Digital skills training for female students launched
Huawei Ghana has launched its digital skill training for female students and residents of Ga Central Municipality (Anyaa-Sowutuom) as part of the Huawei Seeds for the Future-Women in Tech Programme.
With partnership from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, the programme is expected to train 500 girls from Odorgonno Senior High School and 500 girls from the junior high schools in basic information technology (IT) skills.
Advertisement
About 100 girls will also be taken through Chinese culture, experience and fun games as part of the country’s bilateral relations with China.
Objective
The objective of the programme is to bridge the gender gap in Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
It also seeks to motivate women and young girls to consider careers in ICT and other Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-related disciplines, deepen China-Ghana bilateral relations and equip women and girls with ICT skills to enable them to thrive in the modern world.
Girls in ICT
In an address, the Managing Director of Huawei Ghana, Mr Tommy Zhou, noted that it was the aim of the company to promote ICT and to motivate more girls to take up careers in STEM as a contribution towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Five, of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls through ICT.
He stressed the fact that Huawei believed in women in technology and that technology in itself could help empower them, adding that, “we believe that technology innovation can be led by women and technology, in its end, can empower women”.
The Ga Central Municipal Director of Education, Madam Cynthia Winifred Aku Gbadego, emphasised that society was becoming dynamic and the world was moving at a fast pace and there was the need for females to use technology to evaluate and to communicate.
Some students at the launch in Accra
Government’s role.
Also in attendance was the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Madam Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey who, in her speech, stated that bringing technology into the communities was a huge step in strategically positioning the country to use ICT to accelerate its development.
She noted that the government was committed to using ICT education to transform the country’s agro based economy into a knowledge based one, through the effective use of ICT tools for the expansion of the base of the national economy and also for the creation of employment opportunities for the youth.