Young Women to be paid and empowered through technology
In recent years, the tech world has increasingly been dominated by
men. A global research by Women In Tech: The facts, indicated that women
hold only 25% of all computing occupations worldwide.
The first
programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace, who in 1840, wrote the
world’s first machine algorithm for an early machine.
These days, women make up small percentage of computer science graduates and the workforce as well which is very discouraging.
For this reason, a second year student currently studying BSc
Administration at the University of Ghana, Legon and a Co-founder of
Creative App Solution, came up with the initiative dubbed Young Women In
Programming (YWIP). This initiative seeks to empower young ladies to
solve problems in our society, especially tertiary students who have the
passion and attitude to be more conversant with technology by taking
them through the basics and training them to acquire skills in coding,
software development, among others, to develop mobile applications and
also software to solve critical problems of society and help them expand
and grow their businesses.
YWIP was launched on 25th September, 2017 at the University of
Professional Studies (UPSA) with over 200 attendees and important women
that matter in the tech industry such as Farida Bedwei (Co-founder and
CTO of Logiciel Ghana Ltd), Enyonam Kumahor (Managing Partner of the
Cobalt Partners), Dr. Kajsa Hallberg Adu (Lecturer at Ashesi University
and Co-founder of Blogging Ghana), Victoria Lakshimi Hamah (Chief
Executive Officer of Progressive Organisation for Women’s Advancement)
and Jemila Abdulai (Writer, Digital Strategist and Policy Consultant in
Ghana). These speakers addressed the misconception of women as late
adopters to technology, empowering young women to innovate using
technology and leveraging on programming to solve complex problems in
our society.
Since the launch, YWIP has trained 70 women to either create mobile
applications and websites and is aiming to facilitate, encourage and
enable a significant increase in the participation of young women in
higher education to develop professional skills in computer programming
to help solve analytical problems in the society and also breach the
global gender disparity gap and discrimination in the world of tech.
Applications would soon be available for all females to take
advantage of this great opportunity.
These female students would have
access to a training course material which they would have to study on
their own to prepare them for an examination. After the examination the
successful students would then be taken through a six month training
program where they would learn and apply new trends in software
development. This includes training on the in-demand programming
languages.
During this period they would be paid a monthly allowance to
cater for transportation and feeding during the training program. After
the training program they would be matched with software development
firms globally and locally.
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