Women Techsters Initiative

The Women Techsters Initiative is aimed at bridging the digital and technology knowledge divide between men & women, to ensure equal access to all opportunities. By empowering 5 million women and girls across Africa with digital literacy skills by 2030, the Women Techsters Initative will increase the number of women and girls working in STEM fields and thereby improve their livelihood and that of their families. If scaled appropriately, the African continent would see the rise of an army of tech-empowered women and girls who have equal access to decent jobs and can scale their ideas into tech-enabled businesses and deep tech start-ups to aid Africa’s economic growth.  

Currently, the global digital economy is valued at US $11.5 trillion with women within this economy being passive participants. According to the e-Conomy Africa 2020 report, the ratio of men to women in the African technology industry is 80 to 20, with the underrepresentation of women having far reaching effects on Africa's poverty rate.
According to the 2018 report of the World Economic Forum, empowering women to participate equally in the global economy could add $28 trillion in GDP growth by 2025.
Ultimately, we seek to aid the rise of economically empowered African women through successful digital careers.

The Women Techsters Initiative is a robust platform for training women and girls across low-income communities in Africa with basic, intermediate and advanced level digital skills. The free trainings comprise of 4 programs;  

1. Open days: a one-day virtual program organized monthly to teach African women about leveraging technology for career and business growth    

2. Masterclasses:  a series of 1–3-day virtual training programs facilitated by skilled professionals across different sectors and tailored towards equipping women with tech skills  

3. Bootcamps: four weeks of intensive digital skills training aimed at developing relevant coding skills and jump-starting the careers of participants  

4. Fellowships: a year-long coding program with 6 months internship opportunities and enrolment into a mentorship program.

The Women Techsters Initiative aimed at reaching 5 million women across Africa over 10 years has three objectives – to help young girls go on to study advanced STEM programs, to support women start technology career by matching them with jobs (physical and remote) as well as create women techpreneurs.

Our solution serves young women and girls across vulnerable communities in Africa who are between the ages of 16-40 years. By training beneficiaries on needs-based tech skills within their communities we are improving their access to better economic opportunities.  We understand that our target population mostly live below the international poverty line, so we created a job-matching component within the initiative to adequately match beneficiaries with local and international jobs and internship opportunities, through this, they are able to earn decent wages and participate in the digital economy.   

The Women Techsters Initiative ensures that women and girls in underserved communities in Africa are not left out of the digital economy, we do this by providing with relevant digital literacy skills in Product Design, Software Development, Product Management, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Cyber security through physical and virtual trainings. With basic, intermediate or advanced skills in any of these fields, beneficiaries are better positioned to participate in the digital economy.  

With the successful completion of the pilot phase of the Women Techsters Initiative in collaboration with the German Centre for Jobs and Migration and Reintegration in 2018, where 115 women and girls were trained across 5 learning tracks and over 60 of them were matched with internship opportunities at tech-enabled organizations in Nigeria, the Women Techsters Initiative has continued to partner with relevant organizations to increase the reach and impact of the program. So far, over 2400 women and girls have been trained and 1,901 women and girls are currently benefiting from the 2021 program. Our goal is to train 10,000 beneficiaries across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt in 2021. 

26 full-time staff