Tech Buffet for Women

Globally women are poorly represented in the technology industry and Ghana is not an exception. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did a study in 2020  which showed that the unemployment rate in Ghana was about 4.51 percent of the total labor force.Ghana has about 2,752,601 women between the ages of 15-24 years, a youth dependency ratio of 62.2,and female unemployment rate of 8.7%. In addition, a study by IFC revealed that over 9 million jobs will require digital skills by 2030,translating to about 20 million training opportunities in Ghana.

The pandemic has necessitated the importance of acquiring digital skills to enable individuals especially women to provide assistance to their kids and work from home.

This project seeks to build, develop and empower women and girls to increase their digital, work readiness skills, personal development, and leadership skills to ensure their continued access to lifelong income opportunities and future jobs.

Technology has leveled the playing fields and has the power to economically help women and girls to eradicate poverty for future generations. With the right technological skills, one can work remotely anywhere. According to Internet World Statistics, “over fifty percent of the global population will have access to technology in 2019 as compared to 30% in 2010”. 

Nearly 65 percent will have access to mobile phones. This access to technology has necessitated a shift in the skills needed for future jobs, access to markets, and the ownership of businesses. 

These transformations, if managed wisely, could lead to a new age of good work, good jobs, and improved quality of life for all especially women, but if managed poorly, may pose the risk of widening skills gap, greater inequality, and broader polarization.

The importance of digital skills cannot be overemphasized. Culturally,girls are socialized to pursue non-STEM courses. Recent training we conducted among 300 girls indicated that about 230 of them have low self-esteem and confidence.

As indicated above, Ghana has about 2,752,601 women between the ages of 15-24 years, a youth dependency ratio of 62.2, and the female unemployment rate of 8.7% which is the group this project is focusing on.  

The solution we offer is a highly crafted capacity building and mentoring project that will equip,build and empower 10,000 young girls between the ages of 15-25 years to acquire some basic to intermediate technology skills, get ready for work-series,personal development,and leadership skills.The project offers 3 months of intensive and mentorship opportunities for all in the areas of STEM and work readiness.The project will equip women and girls with STEM skills and the Get-Series-for-Work Series will prepare them for work and leadership positions.

1. The STEM series entails acquiring digital skills in email management, telling compelling social stories using data-driven analysis,  social media for business and learning,excel for data collection and analysis,remote mapping, GIS etc.

2.Get-Ready-for-Work Series is further divided into two main programs namely;

• Curriculum Vitae (CV) Clinic Series:- It will bring leaders together to review and give feedback on various CVs submitted by women and girls across the country. It will also teach participants how to write a winning CV.

• Get-Ready-for-Work Chat Series:- This program will cover topics like job retention, asking and getting a pay increase, Communication in the workplace, teamwork, mock interviews, stress management at the workplace etc. 

1. Fifty thousand (50,000) Senior High School Girls between the ages of 15 to 20 years.

2. Five thousand (5,000) female graduates/students in tertiary institutions between the ages of 20  to 25  from 4 different regions.

3. Women and girls between the ages of 20- 25 years of age with a passion to develop their personal lives and leadership skills and get ready for the job market, maintain and progress in their careers using technological tools.

4. Young Career Women

The solution targets women and girls in secondary and tertiary institutions. Based on our previous engagements through other projects, women and girls need to be empowered to embrace digital solutions in their daily lives. This is because due to lack of exposure to technological tools, some of them have marginalized mindsets of what they can do with technology, those with no jobs (unemployed graduates) are dependent on others to survive, some (mothers) willingly stay at home to look after the children and carry out domestic duties and may be struggling to support their families financially. This solution gives them a global skillset in technology and prepares them for work to enable them to be economically empowered.

The project will be targeted at the following:

1.Women and girls between the ages of 15 - 25 who have dropped out of school or finished second or tertiary institutions without employment. 

2.Women and girls between the ages of 15 -25 years of age with a passion to pursue technology careers and develop their personal and leadership skills and get ready for the digital job market.

3.Young Women Entrepreneurs within the age bracket listed above who want to grow their business by applying these digital skills in their business.

Mobile Web Ghana has been in existence for 10 years and has worked on different projects to empower women and girls in Ghana at large. 

Mobile Web Ghana has worked on technology and women empowerment project in collaboration with the US Embassy in Ghana to train the youth especially women and girls in science technology engineering and mathematics and work readiness skills to ensure their continued access to lifelong income during and after the pandemic. During this project, we have built the capacity of more than 800 youths especially women and girls in STEM and Work Readiness skills. 

During this same project, we also empowered more than 400 women during the iLead for Women module of the project. Participants come from Greater Accra Region, Ashanti Region, Upper West Region, and Volta Region.

We are innovating in two main ways: 

The methodology of the capacity-building program and the structure of the project. 

1. The methodology of the capacity building program: -

●  Need Assessment: This process helped to assess pre-existing conditions, the current capacity of participants, existing user patterns with technological tools, availability of connectivity and gadgets/equipment already used by participants eg.  frequency of internet connectivity, type of devices used, assessment of current skillset etc. This helped the team tweak, adapt, and formulate the training content to meet the individual needs of participants and also structure the appropriate help that was needed before, during and after the training.  

●      Use cases/simulations, group work, projects, after training support and activity-based approach to training: The team understands that training programs can be very tedious and boring if not conducted properly. Therefore, during the sessions, our aim was to engage the participants in a number of interesting activities to make them alert and conscious of what the training was about. Some of these activities included ice breakers, question-and-answer sessions, giving souvenirs to those who ask and answer questions etc. All these were done to ensure that they paid attention to what was being taught and that they attached some level of seriousness to all that will be taught. 

2. The structure of the project:- We are combining skills development, work readiness, Internship, and mentorship opportunities for these women and girls through our network of partnerships, and collaborations  

Ghana has 16 regions in total. Currently, the solution has served more than 700 women and girls in the Greater Accra Region, Ashanti Region, Upper West and Volta Region. We would like to scale it to other regions in Ghana.

In one (1)  year we want to directly impact 2,000 women and girls in one region.

In five (5) years we would like to serve 10,000 women and girls in 10 different regions in Ghana. 

We are connected to a network of African leaders across the continent and would like to scale our solution to other countries in the fourth year of the project.

The indicators are

1. Number of girls who attended the training.

2. Number of partners on board.

3. Number of girls and women who registered.

4. Number of trainees who get jobs after the training.

We are made up of a team of 6 core dedicated members, about 20 part-time trainers. We also have volunteer networks we tap into for projects.

We are best suited to undertake this project mainly because we have 10 years track record in the area of ICT for development capacity,and entrepreneurship.We have a strong network of partners in Ghana and other parts of Africa.We have conducted a number of training programs for young ladies and we got feedback from the participants to scale these training to other regions so that other women and girls can benefit from the training.Some of the ladies we trained have gone on to become established in I.T companies in Ghana.These programs are:

1.Females in Mobile Entrepreneurship(FiME):Females in Mobile Entrepreneurship (FiME) is an initiative of Mobile Web Ghana to increase female participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM).This program sought to foster entrepreneurship and empower females through mobile technology training and events.The project reached more than 300 girls with tips about mobile entrepreneurship.

2.Unlocking Women and Technology Project:The Unlocking Women And Technology project seeks to empower women-by offering them free training to innovate through technology.This project was implemented in 2016 and 2017 in collaboration with iSpace foundation and the ladies who participated in it were put into various classes. 

3.Technology outreach for girls:-Mobile Web Ghana has reached more than 2,000 girls through outreach programs to teach school girls coding, encouraging them to pursue technological careers.

4.Visuals for Genders :-Visuals for Gender is an initiative that seeks to equip citizens,policymakers and CSOs to understand gender-based issues using both dynamic and static data visualizations.

4. Technology and Women Empowerement Project

Mobile Web Ghana is a technology & entrepreneurship hub that empowers the youth and organisations to leverage on technological solutions to solve community problems.Our vision is to create a critical mass of change agents in various communities and organisations that use the power of technology to improve lives and work. Professionally, the team is diverse as it consists of software developers, coders, data enthusiasts, graphic designers, website development, digital marketing experts, thought leaders,  social media professionals, communications specialists and project/programs officers or coordinators.  We have an equal representation of males and females which fosters sharing of ideas and creating innovations based on different perspectives. Also, there is no discrimination based on race, ethnicity, culture, educational background and status. We don't want anyone to be left behind as we champion digital inclusion in Ghana and beyond. 

Visit our website here: https://mobilewebghana.org/

Solve has a powerful network of expertise and partners who are passionate about helping to use technology to solve problems. Solve can help us overcome the barrier of raising support and funds for this project. We are looking for financial support to be able to scale this solution to our target group of women and girls who cannot afford to pay for enrollment into this program. 

Solve can also help us to project, market and expose our solution to the world for expert advice, and get volunteers on board. 

We are seeking partnership in the area of funding & revenue model,  marketing, media and exposure. The oxygen of every project is funds and the right marketing exposure to the right partners. Solve has extensive experience in these areas and we will be privileged to have the opportunity to work with Solve on our Tech Buffet for Women (TBW) project.We are also very open to learning new methods and ways of conducting monitoring and evaluation during the project.

We would like to work with MIT faculty or initiatives focused on empowering and developing women and girls to reach their full potential through technology. This can include the pedagogy of teaching and learning, the adaptation of training materials and the delivery of the capacity building event. We are open to learning more about initiatives like this that MIT has undertaken.

We will use this prize to fund the Tech Buffet for Women project in the Volta Region of Ghana where women and girls have less opportunities to learn about STEM and also build their personal lives to reach their full potential. Women and girls in this region are plagued with teenage pregnancies and child trafficking. This prize will help us to scale our tailor made Tech Buffet for Women project to this region to empower them and connect them to internship and mentorship opportunities.

This funding will be used for key project activities, such as training, and logistics and after training support for these women and girls.

We don't only intend to use Tech Buffet for Women for building the capacity of women and girls in STEM. We also intend exposing participants to one of our projects namely  Data Science and AI for tertiary students which aims at building the capacity of tertiary students in data science and artificial intelligence.We are living in an era were 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is produced everyday according to a Forbes publication in 2018. Hence, we want to take advantage of this by introducing these skills to students who can derive insights from data through AI and data analytics tools which will aid in decision making and planning to solve societal problems.

This funding will be used for expanding project activities, such as training, and logistics and after training support create support for students. 

Visit ds4ti.org for more details.