Jamila Gordon: from a Somali village to Qantas and Lumachain

Who is she?

Jamila Gordon is a Somali Australian entrepreneur. She is the founder and chief executive of Lumachain, an Australian software company that tracks food through supply chains, and was earlier chief information officer at the airline Qantas and at the construction group Leighton Holdings, later CIMIC (Wikipedia, Jamila Gordon). The BBC named her one of its 100 Women of 2021 (BBC, 7 December 2021).

Early life in Somalia

Gordon was born in a small village in rural Somalia, into a nomadic family. "The village (where I was born) was very desolate, dusty, we had water in the wells," she told SBS News. "My mother was pregnant every year, or she had a baby ... In the end, she had 16 children" (SBS News, 16 January 2018). She told CIO Australia that two of the children died young and that she was the second oldest and the eldest daughter, responsible for running the household and looking after her brothers and sisters from about the age of six (CIO, 28 February 2017).

She told StartupSmart she was put to work from the age of five instead of going to school: "I always wanted to go to school, that was my passion" (SmartCompany, 29 July 2019). The family moved to Mogadishu, at about the time she was 11, to escape a drought (Wikipedia, Jamila Gordon; SBS News). In Mogadishu she worked in her father's shop, counting what he earned and spent each day (CIO).

Kenya and the move to Australia

As the civil war approached, her father moved the family out of Mogadishu, and the family was scattered. At 18 she was in Kenya, staying with distant relatives she had not met before; she spent just under a year there and called it "the hardest time" of her life (CIO). Through friends in Kenya she met an Australian backpacker. They later married, and she moved to Australia (SBS News).

In Australia she studied English at a TAFE college in Sydney, then a diploma in accounting. Her first job was washing dishes for five dollars an hour (SBS News; CIO). She went to La Trobe University in Melbourne to study accounting, took one programming elective and switched to technology. She told SBS that the way she memorised the Quran in her village "was exactly the same as the process of software programming" (SBS News). She graduated in 1995 (Wikipedia, Jamila Gordon).

Career

• 1995: software developer at QSP Software, which sent her to England to work on systems for British Gas, and to Dubai for Emirates (CIO).
• Late 1990s: applications lead at the insurer GIO in Australia, then Deloitte from 1998 to 1999 (same source).
• 1999 to 2007: IBM Global Services, first as a senior project manager, then in senior roles in Europe for Solectron in Nice, AXA in Paris and ABN Amro in Amsterdam (same source).
• 2007: group chief information officer of Qantas. She oversaw the airline's move to the Amadeus check-in and customer service system (same source).
• Later: chief information officer of Leighton Holdings, later CIMIC (Wikipedia, Jamila Gordon).

Lumachain

Gordon founded Lumachain in April 2018. In July 2019 it raised $3.5 million in a round led by Main Sequence Ventures, which manages the CSIRO innovation fund. The company tracks the origin, location and condition of food items as they move from farm to processing plant to retailer, using blockchain, machine learning and smart devices (SmartCompany, 29 July 2019). She linked the company to her own childhood: it aims to show buyers that products were made without modern slavery (same source). In 2019 Lumachain ran a trial with Microsoft and the meat processor JBS that traced beef from paddock to plate (Microsoft Australia, 18 November 2019).

Awards

• 2009: La Trobe University Distinguished Alumni Award
• 2018: Microsoft's global awardee, International Women's Entrepreneurial Challenge (SmartCompany)
• 2020: NSW Pearcey Entrepreneur of the Year
• 2021: Australia and New Zealand Innovator of the Year, Women in AI Awards
• 2021: BBC 100 Women (BBC)

Awards without a link above are listed on Wikipedia, Jamila Gordon. See also Somali business pioneers.

Sources disagree

• When she left Somalia. SBS says she fled Somalia before the civil war, and CIO Australia says her father moved the family out of Mogadishu just before it began. Wikipedia says she became a displaced person in Kenya once the war broke out (SBS News; CIO; Wikipedia, Jamila Gordon).
• Her degree. CIO Australia says she studied a Bachelor of Accounting at La Trobe. Wikipedia, citing La Trobe, says she graduated with a Bachelor of Business and Information Technology (same sources).
• What Lumachain is. Wikipedia describes blockchain and computer vision software for the meat industry. SmartCompany describes a blockchain platform for food supply chains in general (Wikipedia, Jamila Gordon; SmartCompany).