By Joyce Kantam Kolamong
About 1000 girls selected from the sixteen metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies in the Northern region are currently receiving training on ICT in the region.
The 2-week training, which began on Monday, July 17, will see the girls being taken through basic ICT skills, coding, cyber security, and website development. The best 100 girls will be selected for an award in a competition after the training.
The training forms part of the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation’s Girls In ICT project, which aims to empower and encourage girls and young women to consider studies and careers in the growing field of Information and Communication Technologies.
The Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation, under the stewardship of Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, since 2017 adopted the Girls In ICT initiative as a platform to equip girls between the ages of 9 and 15 with knowledge and skills in basic ICT and Coding. The programme is implemented with support from the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC) as the technical resource provider and training by the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence (KACE). It involves the training of selected girls from the participating region in basic ICT and coding, through which the girls explore the world of technology through the creation of websites, computer games, and animation stories using Scratch.
Since its inception, about 8,000 Girls have been trained and mentored in the Ashanti, Western, Central, Oti, Western North, North East, Bono, Bono-East, and Ahafo regions. 800 teachers were trained to train more girls in ICT, and 43 Cyber laboratories were set up, with 120 more being set up this year. Over
1,200 laptops have been given to teachers and top-performing girls.
This year, the Ministry targets 5,000 girls and 500 teachers from five regions to benefit from the girls in ICT programme. The beneficiary regions are Savannah, Northern, Eastern, Volta, and Greater Accra.
In a statement issued by the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation to the media in Tamale, it said the Girls-In-ICT programme is all about breaking the myth around women involving themselves in ICT. According to the statement, in spite of these important achievements over the years and the immense contributions to the MoCD in support of the programme from various partners, the enormity of the gender digital divide remains a challenge.
It said there is the need to scale up the programme to cover even more girls across Ghana. The ministry was grateful for the support so far and stressed that these generous contributions have enabled the huge expansion of the Programme to five more regions this year.
This year, the Ministry will partner with the Telecom Chamber, Glovo, and other key drivers in the telecommunications industry to train more girls in ICT to bridge the digital divide.