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 reported that women in poor urban areas in developing countries are 50% less likely to use the Internet than men.

Femi TI 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."

For more information about FemiTI, view this documentary video:



About SAP

As the cloud company powered by SAP HANA®, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 77% of the world's transaction revenue touches an SAP® system.

Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers' businesses into intelligent enterprises. SAP helps give people and organizations deep business insight and fosters collaboration that helps them stay ahead of their competition. We simplify technology for companies so they can consume our software the way they want - without disruption.

Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables more than 425,000 business and public customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improve people's lives. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

Visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Distributed by African Media Agency on behalf of SAP Africa.