WHAT EXACTLY IS THE #TechSkills4girls INITIATIVE?
The #TechSkills4Girls Initiative emerged as a result of CATAGs community work, it occured to us that a majority of girls and young women in rural Homabay County neither have access to computers nor the skills to operate them . The purpose of #TechSkills4Girls is to close the digital divide between men and women and, in particular, to create better employment prospects in the digital world for women and girls by giving them digital skills.
In order to achieve this goal, we have combined three key priority areas of development cooperation;
1. dismantling the financial and cultural barriers for women to access education;
2. seizing the opportunities of digitization;
3. and improving the economic, political and social participation of women and girls.
Many processes that affect our daily lives are already handled digitally, be it access to finance, the use of digital education platforms or the sale of products online. Women are in the minority at all levels of the technology sector. The differences are especially striking at executive level, in Kenya, women hold 44, or 9.5 per cent, of the 462 board seats of the 55 companies listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE). Twenty-three of the companies – less than half – have women directors, and those with female board members are majority-owned by multinationals.
The lack of di versity in the tech industry also means that key technologies for the future do not fully reflect women’s needs. That is why it is important to spark an interest in STEM subjects and IT jobs among women and girls from an early age. After all, only those who help design the digital world can change it and help to reduce the gender gap.