The Codette Project

Nurul Jihadah Hussain founded The Codette Project in December 2015. The Codette Project is a non-profit ground-up initiative that aims to get more minority/Muslim women into technology. This aims to create long-term economic change for minority/Muslim women through redistributing social and economic capital, building collaborative communities as well as reclaiming narratives of success to include minority/Muslim women’s stories.  In 2018, Nurul was selected as one of 115 global community leaders as part of Facebook's global Community Leadership Programme. She wants to create better communities, networks and opportunities, and to diversify what success means in society – to prove that success can look like anyone.

• We are committed  to solving the issue of underrepresentation of minority/Muslim women in the tech industry. This includes:
  • Tech solutions are not created by or for minority/Muslim women
  • There are almost no startup founders who are minority/Muslim women
  • Minority/Muslim women are severely underrepresented in tech companies and when working in the tech industry
    
  • There are very few stories of success by and of minority/Muslim women
• This project will create economic and educational opportunities for minority/Muslim women. First, it will provide scholarships and bursaries for minority/Muslim women interested in tech, including funding for college applications. Secondly, we will create the first minority/Muslim female incubator for entrepreneurs, data analysts, students and designers in Singapore.
• We believe in the power of a single woman to create change for herself, her family and her community and want to create a growing, empowered pool of women who are changemakers in their own lives.

There are very few positive representations of minority/ Muslim women in the media, not just now but for generations, and not just in Singapore but around the world.Some studies put the global Muslim population at 1.8 million. 50% of this would be nearly a billion women, but we are almost invisible on every economic stage.While this is not just limited to the tech industry, we would like to focus on the tech industry as we feel that tech is the most level economic playing field that is accessible for many women. Unlike professional careers such as medicine and law, tech does not require formal training. Tech also includes not just coding, development and engineering but also includes social media, design, UX and many more. This multi-pronged issue has the following impact:

• Non-minority/Muslim women do not see or interact with minority/ Muslim women as equals
• Minority/Muslim women do not see themselves represented positively growing up, and lack positive role models
• Tech solutions are not created by or for minority/ Muslim women
• There are almost no startup founders who are minority/Muslim women
• Minority/ Muslim women are severely underrepresented in tech companies and when working in the tech industry

I would like to create a collaborative incubator for minority/Muslim female tech talent. This would be a child-friendly space where entrepreneurs, data analysts, students and designers can come together to create new perspectives, products and startups, as well as develop their existing ideas. Each of these women would be a paid fellow, and would not have to choose between childcare/ employment and the fellowship.The programme would include an incubator, as well as training, prototyping and support for different kinds of businesses. I would also like to be able to provide a full rental kitchen for the many women in our community who need it, 24 hour access as well as social media, graphic, and design support. I would also like to create research and white papers around the Muslim economy, representation and hiring practices across Asia, especially within the tech industry. 

I would also like to be able to sponsor college application fees, as well as bursaries or scholarships for minority/Muslim women interested in learning tech. I believe that the first barrier to entry is the application process, and hope to lower this with specific, targeted support to get more minority/Muslim women into these educational opportunities. 

• My community is minority/Muslim women in Singapore, who suffer disproportionately from below average incomes, family and educational outcomes. We are underrepresented in every story of success. In addition, as it is still legal for women to be fired or rejected from employment if they wear Muslim headgear, many women are underemployed. 
• I would like to encourage the development of alternative economic systems of development, purchase power and support for brown/minority/ indigenous and women-owned businesses in Asia. The leadership of The Codette Project is fully minority/Muslim, and mostly women, and is fairly stable, with less than 10% turnover. 
• I strongly believe in the power of redistributed economic and social capital. As such, the whole team has external full-time jobs. This means that all the funding we have received has gone to those with more need in our community. This has allowed us to ensure that all events, including our yearly hackathon, are completely free for attendees, and that internships and vendors are fairly paid. Your funding would enable us to hire our first space and staff. Over the last five years, our attendees have been about 70% minority/Muslim women, and more than 1000 women have been directly impacted by our programmes. 

As a minority/Muslim woman, I was conscious that there were very few examples of successful minority/Muslim women from a very young age. This is especially true in terms of economic success. However, this has no reflection on the strength inherent in my community. Having an incubator which we own, and which we can use to build better economic systems by and for our people, will help to prove that we can be as successful as any other people if we are given access to resources and the chance to be successful on our own terms.

• I came up with the initial idea for The Codette Project in 2015, as part of a scholarship award pitch, inspired by Black Girls Code. The scholarship fund gave me money to explore the idea, instead of a scholarship. I worked on my initial idea alone for six months, while building my founding team. This was to create a bootcamp for under-served women including single mothers, that could help them parachute into the tech world. However, in August 2016, me and the other 5 members of my founding team had a feedback/testing session where we did a public call for minority/Muslim women to come down and tell us what they thought about our idea. Here, we understood that there was actually a large, untapped demand for tech knowledge and community from a wider variety of minority/Muslim women who have always felt excluded from traditional tech spaces. From this, we pivoted to offering more modular workshops, as well as larger scale events like Singapore's only women's hackathon, and more events around representation and diversity in order to have our community seen, heard and recognised. My team is now 15 volunteers strong from various backgrounds both tech and non-tech. 

When I returned to Singapore after living in the UK, Japan and Egypt, I was still followed around in clothing stores where salesgirls picked up everything I touched like it was contaminated. I did my MBA programme in a great university, where my Singaporean classmate flicked my headscarf and asked me if it was "rude in my culture". The schools I had been to as a child were places in which I was often the only brown face, but it hadn't seemed to matter as much as it now did as an adult. My non-brown friends seemed to be floating happily in life, and I was so frustrated, and so angry. In Singapore it is still legal to be refused a job because you wear the headscarf. Our community is full of elders who have had to choose between economics and faith. Brown girls take dead end jobs because they don't want to choose. I don't want more of my sisters to feel as unseen, insignificant, and hopeless as I have. This community will be my life's work, and if I am only here to pace the women who will build better futures for our people, that's worth it.

• While I have been born and raised minority/Muslim, I have had the exposure to multiple strands of minority/Muslim identity from my time in Egypt and in the UK. I am committed to intersectionality - which is something still quite unusual in Singapore. My time in interfaith work in the University of Edinburgh, as well as my own struggles to reconcile my practice as a Muslim to the behavior of the people I saw around me, means that I believe that I am able to hold space for all minority/Muslim women. I am very clear that there is no space for the aggressive drawing of lines between Muslim/non-Muslim and "model"/ "non-model" minorities. This is something I have implemented in my team which includes various racial backgrounds and nationalities. I have built a team which is in itself a community. We have been to funerals and weddings of team members and that of our families over the last five years.  Personally, I have been committed to the economic success of my team, as I feel that our community must see the possibility of their success reflected in our performance. As such, I have written and endorsed job applications, and pushed my team to be hired, get into university, and get a better economic life than they had before. I now have a stable, confident team that I am sure can help me scale and run projects because they understand the community and have been working together for at least 18 months.

• Personally, it often feels like I am white-water rafting on a leaf, blindfolded. I didn’t have a background in tech before I started The Codette Project, but I really believed in the minority/Muslim women of my community. I saw the kind of resilience, strength and capability that these women have, and I wanted to give not just us but our children the chance to be able to have a life on our own terms – where people who look like us will be accepted for success that we have defined and achieved on our own. 
• When we started, I got hate mail from a Muslim man who objected to the fact that we had featured a female Muslim who sang about social issues, and my team mate had her feature picture from our social media platform stolen and used on an anti-Muslim platform. We are living in a world which cannot imagine our existence as anything other than a caricature, and often denies us success on our own terms. I deal with this by telling myself, my team, and my community that our success is the best form of resistance, and that success can look like us. 

When I met Zee, the first person to be on the Codette team, she didn't consider herself a businesswoman, an entrepreneur, or a designer. We had run into each other at a tech conference - standing out as we were two of the only hijabis there. She listened to my pitch and then committed herself to Codette, saying that if she had had a community like Codette, she would still be in tech.

As part of my team, she designed our logo, and all our initial collateral. She starting having more confidence to pitch for her business. She even went to Korea to represent Codette at a conference, and wrote an entire research paper even though she's never been to college. She calls herself an entrepreneur and ladyboss now.

The proof of my leadership must be in my community. It needs to enable her success, and that of the other women in our community whose talents have been wasted through lack of access and opportunity. She just needed me to see her, and to have confidence in her. I am really proud that she's still part of my team, she's important to me as a reminder of what leadership is.

I am redefining financial sustainability to include the dimensions of redistribution and reparations. Organisations that deal with disadvantaged communities, especially post-colonial and indigenous communities, cannot be held to a financial model that uses capitalism as a measure of effectiveness. Capitalism has extracted so much value from our communities that we need to have new frameworks to understand, create and maintain value within our communities. As such, I am building Codette with a redistributive model that looks at capital from a social and economic power perspective. We are organised such that some activities can run with zero funding if necessary. The work will not stop even if we have no funding, although funding is what will allow us to scale and deepen our impact.

We are looking at building more acceptance of diversity in the tech industry, as well as in the representation and understanding of minority/Muslim women. We are also looking at building long-term resilience networks of economic support and community. This would include the funding of long-term educational opportunities, as well as professional support and mentorship networks. I am inspired by the concept of the "black dollar" to explore how more dollars can be diverted into minority/Muslim women's economies, and to make sure that this stays for longer within the community.

We have served more than 1400 women in real life over the last 5 years. Online, we have a global reach of more than 4000, with women as far away as Europe following us. Our reach is organic and consistently growing, especially for special events like A Day in the Life, where we feature a day in the life of minority/Muslim women around the world. 

If coronavirus still makes it impossible for us to meet in real life, we will pivot to a primarily online content creation model which will hopefully help to normalise minority/Muslim success. In addition, we will be creating funding opportunities for minority/Muslim students and businesswomen to help amplify economic success for our community. It is quite frankly impossible to estimate numbers for the next year, as this is dependent on government restrictions.

I estimate that we can grow our online reach to possibly 40k followers in five years, with 5000 people impacted in real life through our activities.

The big dream is to create a space where I can take in a constant stream of minority/Muslim women and where they can learn, create and invent in a safe space. I'd like for this to be a physical space, because while the online world is important, a physical sense of safety is necessary for emotional and social resilience. 

I would like to continue to redefine and showcase what success looks like, and to continue to show that minority/Muslim women are successful, and that we deserve to be part of the stories of success that we hear. 

In the next five years, I hope to be able to launch satellite groups across the world, especially on university campuses, in order to encourage more minority/Muslim women to create their own narratives of success. 

Financially we are dependent on grants and funding for larger scale projects, so the specific project of having a physical incubator is not possible if we do not get the Elevate Grant. Instead, we will focus on smaller scale, cheaper programmes like tech workshops and creating online content. 

Covid-19 is definitely an issue, as physical community is an important part of what we do. This will be an issue if it goes on for much longer. However, instead I would focus on providing funding and monetary assistance to those who are financially hit by this. 

Yes, we have received funding this year from Zendesk, which we hope to put towards organisational and running costs, as well as to fund an additional scholarship to help those affected by Covid-19. 

We are also part of a local exhibition of women called Women of N.O.W. Singapore which is raising funds for 6 different non-profits, including ourselves. 

We are not affiliated with any government or gov

We receive sustained donations and grants for our activities, and hope to sell more products such as tote bags and stickers as well. 

If we do not receive this funding, it is unlikely that we will be able to raise the amount for the incubator through other means. We will then focus on our other, smaller-scale projects.

We estimate expenditure to be limited to our Codette Cares project which funds students and women entrepreneurs ( 10 000 SGD) as well as operating costs ( approx 5000 SGD) due to the impact of coronavirus. If we do run another Codette Cares funding programme, this will likely be another 10 000 SGD

I'm tired of being told that my community doesn't work hard enough, that we aren't smart enough, that we haven't been as successful because we aren't good enough. I am frustrated that economic success has passed us by for generations, and that our stories of success seem to always come from tragedy. I want to rip up the playbook that says we must have come from tragedy and create our own stories of joy and celebration that come from success on our own terms. The Elevate Prize is the only funding I've seen which has enough funding to help me create an actual physical community of successful minority/Muslim women defining success on our own terms - and this is something I've never seen before. I want to do this, even if I only do it once, so that our daughters will know that it was possible. 

I would like to understand how to build long term brand partnerships with brands to create cobranded items which can help to fund us through their sales. 

Also, I would like to work with international organisations to fund in-kind services like access to accounting and legal advice for minority/Muslim businesswomen. 

I would like to move out from a Singapore/ Asian focus and to figure out how I can bring this system and this message to more minority/Muslim communities around the world and help other women build communities like this for themselves. 

Also, honestly it gets kind of lonely doing this work, so I would like to hear from other people how they've done it, and balanced their other priorities as well. A mentor who understands my struggle, and who can listen to my story would be very much appreciated. 

I would like to work with Fenty Beauty to create a co-branded lipstick as well as a work-ready makeup kit that can be sold to fund our operations in the long-term. This could be something that we can do with other organisations like Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics as well. 

I would like to create an advertising campaign with a tech or tech-related organisation like Shutterstock that reimagines what tech would look like if it was dominated by minority/Muslim women. We have tried to do this here - https://www.shutterstock.com/g/the+codette+project but I think that there is a lot more that we could do about this. If we could create images that include diversity in tech (e.g. robots that are not just white) to showcase the issues in tech, this would also serve to highlight the issues we face. 

I would like to create a campaign where tech publishing agencies like Buzzfeed, INC and other organisations commit to hiring minority/Muslim talent. This could be in the form of a remote international internship programme. 

I would also like to learn from talent agencies, as I think that there is a lot of online talent within my community - is there a way in which I can help them do better and to leverage their influence? 

I would really like to work with Black Girls Code as I feel like there is so much I can learn from their success and what they've done to create a community for minority girls in tech.