New skills development initiative aims to bring Ghanaian girls into STEM fold

With a significant drop-out rate of girls from primary school to secondary school and college, one new initiative in Ghana aims to improve the country's innovation, competitiveness and productivity by bringing more girls into the formal digital fold. A report by the World Wide Web foundation found that women in poor urban areas in developing countries are 50% less likely to use the Internet than men.

FemiTI is a project initiated by the DreamOval Foundation that aims to train young girls to develop problem-solving skills through coding and robotics and empower them to facilitate technology creation to generate opportunities for Societal Transformation, thereby ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. The first edition of FemiTI has just been concluded in partnership with SAP.

According to reports, 75% of girls in Ghana attend primary school, but there's a significant drop in girls in high school and college. The DreamOval Foundation believes this gap can be bridged through the active development of women by introducing them to STEM-related programmes.

Francis Ahene-Affoh, Senior Vice President at the DreamOval Foundation, said: "We believe in empowering women in the 21st century as they play a key role in the development process. We identified these girls from underprivileged communities who can be empowered digitally to become problem-solvers for their communities."

Cathy Smith, Managing Director at SAP Africa, said this has implications for efforts toward building peaceful, prosperous and sustainable communities. "Our support for FemiTI is in line with our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially as they related to Gender Equality (#5) and Quality Education (#4) and aligns well with our broader activities to bring more women into the digital fold, including Africa Code Week, Women in Data Science and #SheInnovates."