Papu, (UW/R), June 29, GNA – At least 60 Junior High Schools (JHS) girls in the Nadowli-Kaleo District have been provided with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) training to help enhance their learning activities and whip up their interest to consider career opportunities in the IT sector.
The beneficiary girls were largely members of the European Union funded Resilience Against Climate Change (EU-REACH) Nature Clubs in the Saint Paul’s Roman Catholic and Nadowli Module JHSs.
The training was in partnership between the EU-REACH project implemented by the German Development Cooperation (GIZ), and the Yison Tech Hub to help expose the girls to basic ICT skills including operating the Google search engine, Microsoft Word, and PowerPoint among others.
The GIZ formed the Nature Clubs in some basic schools in the region to imbibe into the children the culture of good environmental practices that would help protect the environment as part of the implementation of the EU-REACH project.
Mr Mustapha Yakubu, the Technical Advisor for ICT at the EU-REACH project, said the training was a pilot project and could be scaled up to other Nature Clubs based on its success rate.
He said the initiative was necessitated by the need to bridge the technological gap between females and males as fewer females than males had ventured into the ICT space.
“If you look at research that have been coming out, females tend to shy away from the technology field. So, we want to expose them to various opportunities that come with technology.
“There are so many opportunities in tech, talking about the database, network engineering, system engineering, and software development”, the Technical Advisor explained.
He said exposing the children to technology at their early stages of life would enable them to start thinking along the lines of using technology to reduce climate change, which was the core mandate of the REACH project.
Mr Yakubu said some children in the northern part of the country did not even have the opportunity of seeing basic technological devices such as laptops, and would, therefore, likely not think about going into the technology sector.
Mr Issahaque Serikpera Naa, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Yison Tech Hub, an ICT firm in Wa, said the aim of the training was to help contribute to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 which sought to achieve gender equality by 2030.
He said that the world evolved around technology but that the technological space was dominated by the males hence the need to bring the females on board.
“This idea is to create awareness and to also let them know that the world is going the IT way and there are a lot of job opportunities in that area, which women can also take advantage of”, Mr Serikera Naa said.
GNA