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Kenya: Mentorship Programmes Draw Women to ICT
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Business Daily (Nairobi)
15 July 2008
Posted to the web 16 July 2008
Abyssinia Lati
Nairobi
In an award ceremony set to be held later this year in the US, one of the people to be awarded will be a Kenyan woman, Dorcas Muthoni. She will be receiving the Anita Borg Change Agent award from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.
Ms Muthoni is being recognised for her three years' labour to get more girls and young women interested in Information Communication Technology (ICT), through mentorship programmes, workshops, book donations to schools and events.
She is living the dream of the founder of the institute, the late Anita Borg, who once said that "women need to assume their rightful place at the table, creating the technology of the future."
Ms Muthoni is now in the driving seat in an industry dominated by men. The founder and managing director of Openworld, a software consultant company that started in 2004, Muthoni left formal employment two years ago to build her dream company.
"Women in Africa need to do something to encourage girls to do subjects related to computing," she says. But it is not only Africa that has a negligible number of women in influential positions in this sector. Looking at the global scene, few women are in top management like that held by former president of Hewitt-Packard, Carly Fiorina who was one time named the most powerful woman in business by Forbes magazine.
Take Alice Munyua for example. She came back home to set up the Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) but found herself in a male crowd most of the time. That was just five years ago.
"I had to align myself with them to be taken seriously," she says.
Gilda Odera, the managing director of Skyweb-Evans faced the same predicament. While attending industry functions two years ago, she would find herself in a crowd of men and they would naturally assume that she was one of the event organisers. Like Ms Muthoni, she is working to get more women into the ICT industry through mentorship programmes.
It all has something to do with girls being discouraged from taking science subjects in school. Catherine Adeya's late father, the educationist Ambrose Adongo and Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) official did not believe that science is male turf. He encouraged her to take up ICT and she became part of the pioneering class of 1988 of the new degree programme in Information Sciences at Moi University.
Now with a doctorate in ICTs and Development, she is now working to get women into the sector. She remembers giving a talk in some girls' schools in her rural home in Ugenya where she noticed that the girls opened up when the teachers left the room.
"The teachers do not understand what ICT is, so they discourage the girls and instead push them into taking law or medicine," she says.
As the research and training manager at African Technology Policy Studies (ATPS), Dr Adeya seeks to address such issues and will soon be introducing a new programme called "African women in Science and Technology" alongside the "Science, Technology and Innovation Career Mentoring Programme".
This sector is the most misunderstood as people think it is just about computers when it actually means all mediums of communication, from radio to mobile phones, she says. During her mentorship travels, Dr Adeya was asked by one of the girls: "'You mean ICT is not just about closing and opening computers.'"
Alice Munyua the National Co-ordinator of the Kenya ICT Action Network.
The lack of information and a proper set curriculum for schools leaves teachers in the dark about the kind of information they should be sharing with their students.
ICT is learned by doing, so students should be given unlimited access. But there should be guidelines. Although the women interviewed disagreed with affirmative action as a solution, some expressed the need for a policy for the rural areas to encourage girls and give them, along with their parents and teachers, more information on the industry.
"If the girls cannot explain what ICT is then the lack of information might sway their decisions to stay away," says Ms Muthoni. Girls need to be made competitive from an early age with support in mathematics and sciences to arm them with skills to enter the industry. "There is slow change but not so in the rural areas ," says Ms Odera.
Mentorship from women in the industry and confidence building will enlighten women on the know-how of the field. Alice Munyua, who is in the board of the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), says the body is in the forefront to ensure girls learn ICT in secondary schools and encourages innovation.
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"Other than technical, one can pursue policy development or legal aspects of ICT," says Ms Munyua.
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