Written by Nthanda Manduwi
Editor-in-Chief, VoD
Aicha Evans belongs to a rare breed of tech leaders: a Silicon Valley CEO whose global upbringing and humanitarian focus give her a uniquely grounded perspective. She is the Senegalese-born, Paris-raised engineer who now runs Zoox – Amazon’s self-driving car subsidiary.
In June of 2020, Aicha led Zoox’s $1.3 billion acquisition by Amazon, cementing her role in guiding one of the boldest mobility ventures on Earth. Her journey from hacking rotary phones in West Africa to piloting futuristic robotaxis is the kind of story that resonates with women and youth in tech around the world – an inspiring example of crossing borders (literal and figurative) to lead with purpose.
Between Dakar and Silicon Valley
The story of Aichatou Sar Evans starts thousands of miles away from the Silicon Valley.
Aicha was born in Senegal, and raised in Paris in a family of engineers, giving her a naturally worldly outlook. Even as a child she saw technology’s power: she once “decided to figure out how to hack” the locked rotary phone in her Dakar home so she could call school friends in France. The prank left her father stunned by a huge phone bill – but it taught young Aicha “the difference when you have technology available… versus when you don’t”.
“Since I wanted to just be me, I came to the U.S. to study,” she later explained, earning a computer engineering degree at George Washington University. In all that, she never lost sight of society’s needs. “I love technology and its impact. How does it make people’s lives better? How does it advance society?” she asks, and that question has guided her career.
Reinventing Mobility from the Ground Up
Zoox was founded in 2014 with an audacious mission: to build a completely new kind of vehicle and transit service. Unlike retrofit approaches that bolt self-driving hardware onto old cars, Zoox designs its robotaxis from the chassis up – small, fully electric shuttles with no steering wheel and seats that face one another.
As Amazon’s announcement put it, Zoox is “pioneering the future of ride-hailing by designing autonomous technology from the ground up with passengers front-of-mind”. Evans likes to describe the passenger experience: “We pick you up in this beautiful machine, almost like a moving living room… you can be on your phone, you can meditate, you can relax,” she told a Stanford audience. In practice this means riders need only choose a destination while the vehicle quietly steers itself on city streets.
Zoox’s goal is big: to make city traffic safer, cleaner, and more efficient. Zoox’s pods are zero-emission and built for shared use.
Evans notes that Americans own roughly two cars apiece but use them only about 4% of the time – a waste of money, space, and the planet’s resources. By treating each vehicle as an on-demand service – “as soon as you need it, you have it; but when you don’t need it it’s being used by somebody else,” she says – Zoox aims to shrink that waste. Fewer cars on the street can free up land now given over to parking and cut pollution. “Hopefully we can make a dent into personal car ownership… which means good for the environment and good for society,” Evans notes. Reflecting on the Amazon deal, she celebrated having “an even greater opportunity to realize a fully autonomous future” for safe, sustainable mobility – the kind of future where technology actually improves life for everyone.
Leading with Curiosity and Compassion
Evans’s leadership style breaks the Silicon Valley mold in several ways. Heidi Roizen, one of Zoox’s early investors and former Board Members captures her leadership approach quite beautifully:
- Humble curiosity: Evans often starts difficult conversations by admitting what she doesn’t know. She might begin a call with her investors or advisers by saying “Explain this to me,” seeking clarity and counsel. She treats board members as trusted collaborators, not distant overseers. When faced with a tough problem she once said on the phone, “help me think through this,” drawing on outside expertise to move Zoox forward.
- Fearless transparency: When setbacks occur, Evans communicates immediately. She “tells her boards right away when there is bad news,” as one board member recalls. Instead of hiding problems, she prefers to address them openly. In one meeting she even asked bluntly, “Tell me what I’m doing wrong,” soliciting brutally honest feedback from her directors. By turning every mistake into a learning moment, she accelerates progress instead of pretending all is well.
- Empowering leadership: Aicha believes her job is to enable, not to do. “I had to get comfortable being an enabler as opposed to being a doer,” she says. She trusts that great ideas come from the team. “You’re my most important customers,” she tells employees – meaning their buy-in and creativity are the biggest keys to success. When someone on the team suggests a better approach, she says, “thank you, tell me more and let’s do it”. She invests in her people’s growth, not just the company’s metrics, and believes the multiplier effect of an engaged team is huge.
- Living values: Above all, Evans walks the talk. “You have to live by your word,” she warns – if a leader preaches risk-taking but panics at the first failure, the lesson is lost. She strives to model the trust, patience, and resilience she demands from others. For example, she refuses to punish teams for experimenting; instead she gives credit for initiative, reinforcing the very innovation she wants to see. In a safety-critical field like autonomous vehicles, this consistency builds confidence that Zoox’s leaders will do the right thing no matter what.
Building Community, Changing the Conversation
Evans sees Zoox as part of a larger mission: inclusive progress. She speaks bluntly about Silicon Valley’s diversity gaps. “Well, it is not good,” she observes of current inclusion. “This is not about the scarcity of talent. It’s about things that are systematic,” she says, pointing out that many bright kids never get the same STEM opportunities – their parents may have to work weekends, or their schools may lack robotics mentors. “We need to create a mentality where we say, ‘The systematic stuff is everyone’s problem,’” Evans urges. This human-centered outlook extends to Zoox’s service: she emphasizes that the vehicle “doesn’t decide who the rider is… If a rider is available, we’ll take you from point A to point B”. In other words, the ride should be open to anyone, not reserved for a privileged few.
Evans herself is a powerful example of what she preaches. Her appointment made her “one of the very few Black women ever to lead a billion-dollar Silicon Valley company”, a fact that inspires many even if she rarely boasts of it. Tech writer Tony Lawson calls her “one of the most accomplished and influential women in tech”. She uses that platform to mentor others and speak out, showing that leadership in mobility (and development) can come from anywhere. In Zoox’s Bay Area workshops and online conferences, Evans regularly highlights equity and environmental benefits – linking self-driving cars to reduced emissions and more livable cities. As one profile notes, Evans has become “a prominent voice for innovation, equity, and representation in tech”. Her message resonates with development professionals: building better systems means lifting up every part of society, not just chasing the latest gadget.
On The Road Ahead
Through it all, Evans reminds her team (and us) that “you have a choice — you can let things happen to you or you can happen to things.”
This motto, born of a life straddling continents and challenges, encapsulates her can-do spirit. As Zoox’s vehicles cruise toward public roads in California and beyond, they carry more than passengers – they carry the values Evans built into them. For young women and innovators in the Global South, her example is proof that with vision and integrity one really can shape the future. In an industry often dazzled by hype, Aicha Evans shows how to keep feet on the ground: focus on people, nurture purpose, and never stop learning.
Her leadership is, at its heart, a human story. It is about a girl from Senegal who learned that a simple phone call can reveal worlds, and now strives to ensure everyone has access to technology’s promise. In Evans’s world, every ride in a Zoox robotaxi is a step toward safer streets and shared prosperity. She’s proving that the age of autonomous mobility can be as much about compassion as it is about code – a lesson that, if taken to heart, can drive us all toward a more equitable tomorrow.
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Designed as a seasonal publication, Voice of Development brings together research, reporting, and analysis meant to be read deliberately and revisited over time. Winter 2026 is a starting point: an attempt to answer, with clarity and restraint, what AIs can actually do—and what they cannot do.
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