Spring 2014 Pass-It-On Award Winners
Announcing our Spring 2014 Pass-It-On award winners who are from USA, Boznia and Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, United Republic of Tanzania, and Uganda. Read about their projects and how they intend to “pass on” the benefits of their awards to impact their communities.
Project Title: Expanding opportunities for digital work in Dadaab, Kenya for women and girls
Project Description: In the wake of violence and drought, over 340,000 Somali refugees have temporarily settled in Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya. Over 60% of the camp’s population are women, most of whom “have never had any exposure to formal education.” These women fall through the gaps of the growing global “schooled society” despite economic reconstruction and repatriation efforts. In addition, over a third of women living in the camps report experiencing gender-based violence and with only 1 health center for every 39,000 people, healthcare provision is inadequate. In response to the pressing humanitarian and repatriation concerns of refugees, international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have embraced the concept of ‘empowerment’ in educational programming in line with Millennium Development Goal 3 (MDG 3).
Within technology training programs, however, gender equality and empowerment objectives are frequently sidelined in the interest of spreading technological literacy and due to structural obstacles to women’s participation in programming. Allyson’s project combines project evaluation and research to address empowerment in future programming for women in NGO digital trainings in refugee settings in Dadaab, Kenya. This project supports and links to the field of computing through reporting on and analyzing the position of women within these trainings, the gendered implications of technology training in refugee settings, and proposed recommendations towards an expansion of opportunities for women learners in refugee settings.
Project Title: After the Break — Second Careers
Project Description: Returning to work can be both exciting and overwhelming. For women, it is an ordeal to get back to work after a long break — whether it is because of marriage and childbirth or health reasons. After all that time off, women may no longer feel confident that they can cope with the workplace because they find that the expertise requirement and technical developments in the workplace have advanced so far in the meantime placing them in a competitive disadvantage. They either have to catch up in a very short span of time or seek a completely different type of employment. This also creates a vacuum in the potential talent pool and ends up in gender imbalance up in the career ladder.
To encourage the women engineers and technologists who have taken a break and who wish to return, Ramalatha will use her award fund to create a forum where returning women will participate in collective online activities and receive resources to help support their efforts. Helping in the development of the forum will also help to enhance and update their technical skills. Events will be planned to create a training network, where the returning women can refresh their skills by training young budding engineers and students. In addition this will be a great opportunity for like minded people with similar ideas to start new ventures and for the employers to find talents and experience together.
Project Title: Women-to-Women Technology Meetup
Project Description: A one-day Women-to-Women Technology Meetup. This would be a first-of-its-kind event in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the regions of the Western Balkans. This focused and intensive one-day event will be targeted at attracting female high school students and young women to come to Campus to hear from, work and connect with accomplished female entrepreneurs, educators and industry leaders in IT. The target audience will include a minimum of 30 women (including senior high school female students, university female students, and female career starters).
The Women-to-Women Technology Meetup will provide girls and young women from the wider local female population with a unique opportunity to hear from women currently pursuing successful careers in academia, industry and civil society in IT. In addition to this, the hands-on laboratory breakouts titled DoING IT will give participants a taste of actually and practically doing IT: Mobile App Development and Web Design Tracks. Combined, this event is envisioned to provide relevant first-hand information and increase girls’ confidence in choosing science, technology, and engineering as their career path.
Project Title: KM Computing for Girls
Project Description: Millions of girls are victim of gender inequality in every corner of the world. Especially in the developing countries this problem is severe and needs immediate attention. Very few percentage of the female population in Nepal is exposed to formal education. Moreover technology and girls are not the two concepts that go hand in hand in Nepalese society where the role of most women is generally confined to a housewife. Well aware of this problem, Ms. Chandani Shrestha ventured a project, “KM Computing for Girls” geared towards empowering young girls in her home country Nepal, through technology.
Through “KM Computing for Girls” project, Chandani collaborated with Rainbow Children Home Nepal, an esteemed orphanage in her hometown, to facilitate young girls in the orphanage with computer and coding tutoring classes. Few generous sponsors have donated four desktop computers for the project. The primary long term goals are 1) accommodate not just young girls but even older women in community in the tutoring classes and change the social myth that computers and technology are not for girls 2) Expand the tutoring sessions and have more advance level of tutoring available. With these goals set, “KM computing for Girls” certainly can be a great agent to “pass on” the computer literacy for girls through generations.
Project Title: Grow them Young Cell Outreach Program
Project Description: Chinenye’s project aims to reach out to girls within the age of 14-18 in public secondary schools in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Presently, there are five schools in focus, with the establishment of STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) cells established in two out of the five. The overall goal is to set up these cells which comprises of a group of University undergraduates that will be visiting these public schools monthly. We are hoping to reach out to at least 600 girls by the end of the year 2014, and have so far empowered at least 100 girls in the past few months.
This project is very important to Chinenye because she knows that ordinarily, these students will not be exposed to these kinds of practicals in school. This can be attributed to the poor state of education and infrastructures in Nigeria. We want to use every available resources and opportunities to improve the lives of these young ones, and expand their horizon into a wider learning platform, so they can become better women, who will lead to the development of Africa.
Project Title: Computing in rural women
Project Description: Alice’s project is concerned on teaching rural women in Nyarusange village, Nyanza district, southern province, Rwanda country. Rwanda is a developing country and it is still developing in different areas, including technology especially computing.
Rwanda government programs and different projects associated with computing in Rwanda , Alice found that even though rural children now have access to computers, their mother are not knowledgeable about computing at all. Alice started volunteering and gathered twenty women in Nyarusange village and started to teach them how computers are used, using her own personal computer.
Much of the focus was about the Internet because they were curious to know many things they hear their husband and young people saying about using Facebook, whatsapp, e-mail and others. Alice was thrilled to see a women in Nyarusange village writing an email to her child who is at school as this is helping the target group to be more computer literate and to be curious and aware of what is happening on the entire world. Computing in rural women is helping Rwanda achieve its goals as a developing country.
Project Title: Enhancing women development through computer basic knowledge training
Project Description: The project is designed to enhance the knowledge of young women in basic computing technology. It project will be implemented in Kikukwe village will equip young women with basic computer knowledge in Office application such as word, excel, power point and introduce them to the Internet which will help them to know how to search for constructive and development information that is in line with their daily undertakings. In the Tanzania education IT is in the curriculum both in primary and secondary schools. It is very unfortunate that most schools have no computers, no electricity facilities or even IT skilled teachers to enable them have the practical part in computer knowledge. However this makes most students complete their studies either with partial theoretical basic computer knowledge (demonstrated in pictures) without knowing how the computer looks like or totally not knowing its practical application.
Young girls/women have numerous aspirations of advancing their knowledge and development initiatives but all these are paralyzed by antagonistic social and economic conditions they experience which include poverty, early marriages, unwanted pregnancies, early family responsibilities and social norms that suppress women’s efforts to come to public. The project will contribute to the empowering of girls/young women; for those in school it will augment to what they are taught in schools hence aid their performance.
Project Title: Empowering Teen Mothers Through Basic Computer Training and Financial Literacy Education
Project Description: This project is meant to equip girls in the age bracket of 14 -20 years of age who dropped out of school because of pregnancies, who studied in schools which do not offer computer studies as part of the school curriculum with computer studies and financial literacy education to enable them survive in today’s computer world. The project will be applied in Makerere Kikoni in Kawempe division, a village faced with high rate of school drop out because of pregnancies. The project shall offer the teens hands on computer training with the aim to equip them with basic computer skills such as: Introduction to computer, speed typing, using micro soft word, Excel, power point and internet communication among others. It will also equip the teens with financial literacy skills such as, the saving culture, how to become entrepreneurs, opening up bank accounts and business record keeping skill.
Additionally, project shall also aim at providing guide and counseling services to teen mothers to help them overcome the stressful kind of life they face, such as being chased away from home, lack of where to stay among others. The training shall expose them to life skills, like self esteem, communication skills among others they will also be taught the different family planning methods.
Project Title: Online Career Guidance for Girls in Computing in Ethiopia
Project Description: Every year thousands of girls join a university in Ethiopia. A lot of them have hard time deciding what field they should be choosing. Girls, who have passed this challenge and made a choice, graduate in the field of their choice. Some of them graduate in computing. The next challenge is how to proceed with the next step in their life: what, where and how they work or whether or not they should start working or continue with further study. In both of these situations well organized and reliable information addressing their individual needs is vital for the decisions they make and the successful journey they want to have ahead of them. The Online Career Guidance for girls in Computing in Ethiopia aims to do this.
The Online Career Guidance for girls in Computing in Ethiopia is a website project. The project designs, publish, advertise and maintain a website. First, the website will contain information for girls joining a university and who want to know whether computing would be their field of interest. Second, the website will contain information on jobs and further studies for recent graduates in computing. Third, the website will contain links of resources for girls who are studying computing. On the other hand, the website will be a meeting point for girls who want mentor-ship and other women professionals in computing who want to mentor a girl in computing.
Project Title: App Summer Camp for Girls
Project Description: In July 2013 we (Diana — computer scientist & Marie — teacher) organized the first “App Summer Camp”. Twelve girls aged 13 to 15 learned how to develop Android Apps on their own. But they did not only learn programming. They also learned how to pitch and present their results to an audience. Another important part of the four day workshop was to meet female role models who work as software engineers and mobile app developers. With no or only little prior knowledge about programming the girls were at first rather shy. But it didn’t take very long for them to warm up. After having programmed their first apps with the App Inventor, everyone got excited.
The goal was to find others for the team. 13 year old girls have awesome ideas for apps. And guess what, all of them did an awesome job pitching! After some discussions, five teams were formed: For example, one team developed an app that allows you to play “spin-the-bottle” even if you don’t have a bottle. Another team developed an app called “MyPresent”. This app suggests birthday gifts for boys or girls of different ages. While designing and implementing their apps, the girls experienced how much fun and how creative programming can be. Female coaches, who are all working as software engineers, helped the teams and gave feedback.
The “App Summer Camp” was an awesome experience for everyone involved — the girls, the coaches and us, the organizers. Therefore we don’t want the App Summer Camp to be a one-hit wonder. In the summer of 2014 we would like to organize another App Summer Camp for girls. One special aspect of this new camp will be, that some of the participants of last year will be coaches this time. This is a great opportunity for mentoring and continuous learning.
Project Title: Capacity Building in ICT and Entrepreneurship Skills for The Girl Child
Project Description: The main objective of the project is empowering the girl child with IT and Entrepreneurship Developmental Skills with the aim of training school girls in the age bracket of (16 -22 years) of Kawala Parish, Kampala Division with no computer knowledge. The training would be conducted during holidays for 3 days in a week. The intention is to develop sensitization campaign where IT experts will be visiting schools talking to girls about the importance of Technology in the globe and encouraging them to join the project for ICT skills, they would be trained in the following packages/applications: Multimedia Applications (Animation Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash and Dreamweaver), Computer skills like (Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point and Access) plus understanding hardware and software.
Above all they would be trained in Entrepreneurship Development Skills like starting up income generating activities, giving them ideas of how to start up and manage a business and this would help them become self-employed hence improving their standards of living.
Project Title: ICT for Change —Creating the Nexus
Project Description: The project is an approach my project will use towards changing communities from within and creating the common language of hope for an already hopeless situation of young women and girls who are doing extremely great jobs within their communities but are finding is difficult to let the word out on what they are doing.
Upon implementation, this project will then achieve the following:
• Improved utilization of information, social media, and technology skills.
• Increased self-confidence and pride in their abilities to bring about change.
• Improved communication, critical thinking, and leadership skills.
• Improved ability to work collaboratively, solve problems and think creatively.
• Increased chances to find support in the virtual, information-driven and computer-aided world.
• Increased level of understanding around security threats, benefit and opportunities around ICT and social media.
Help Us Continue To Pass-It-On
We receive so many application to our Pass-It-On Award program, but we can only award what we are able to raise in donations. Please consider donating to our PIO awards program so that we can continue to “pass on” the benefits of Systers.
