In the last part of this series, Samia covers "What's next?" on this issue as she highlights the actionable goals the conference in Tunisia set up to enhance women's participation in ICT and thus improve lives and communities
The conference concluded with a few action items concentrated around these 4 thematic areas:
Declaration of Carthage was announced, calling for: (a) Creation of a network of men and women engineer working on better understanding how to engender engineering, mentoring, and engendering innovation, scientific research, ICTs and content production;
(b) Creation of ten regional centers to support this network and provide resources and expertise on the topic and working with UN system and local government’s statistical agencies, ICT ministries and women associations to implement and use a set of indicators that will allow to measure progress.; (c) mobilizing policy makers , academia and private sector to contribute to the analytical work and research ongoing on topic.
In particular actionable items were collectively agreed upon in these broad categories:
Women in Engineering and Technology Workforce
Advocating for and supporting the career prospects of women in engineering and technology while making an inclusive organizational culture that expects women to function at their full potential for the benefit of that organization and that provides them with the opportunities.
Increasing the participation of women leadership including in the governance of the profession of S&T and ICTs. Retaining and advancing women in their careers in engineering and technology. Build supportive co-ed professional engineering associations.
Offer plans to increase capacity of institutions and organizations supporting the success of women in engineering and technology, mentoring networking and knowledge sharing on different programs.
Women in Engineering Education
Advocating for and supporting the education of women in engineering and technology. By (a) attracting and preparing girls for education in engineering and technology, (b) Improving access to and retaining women in higher education in engineering and related technology studies (c) Creating good programs, coaching and mentoring schemes for women in engineering and technology academic career and (4) Helping create support networks.
Recommend successful initiatives for the recruitment of girls into classes and activities to stimulate their interest in engineering and technology
Programs for the education and training for women in engineering and technology. The EU shadowing model is a model many representatives found very convincing.
Women as Entrepreneurs of Small and Medium Enterprises
Creating opportunities for women engineers and technologists in developing small and medium enterprises, market their product, patent their innovation and connect to the global supply chain and (b) Enhancing prospects for employment, benefits and advancement of women in small and medium enterprises; (c) mobilizing donors and private sector and ICT industry as sponsors of (a) and (b) strategies above at a country or regional level. Incubation for women businesses was discussed at length and a majority of the participants called for Innovation funds and Venture Capita for women-run SMEs in the S&T, media, content and ICTs sectors. Private sector companies such as Intel, Cisco and HP are already investing in such ventures.
Women Enabling Technology in Communities
Technical and computer literacy for girls and women was found to be the number one policy to implement in basic education strategies and agenda, with the caveat that educating the teachers (at 80% female in basic education) was the most important priority. As several participants shared their experience of capacity building programs that started with the elementary and secondary teachers before the students were trained it became more evident to all that educating teachers on ICTs and rewarding them for sustaining and maintaining school-based ICT infrastructure was key to success in educating the children.
Focus on neglected rural areas and providing adequate information to the whole community but with a focus on rights and legal entitlements of women and young girls as well as a focus on community education, health and hygiene, and land management.
Monitoring and Evaluation
Participants identified current and needed indicators on women’s participation in engineering and technology, proposed approaches to address gaps in data and suggested new processes for collecting and disseminating these statistics
The issue of indicators can only be resolved if statistics agencies, Education and ICT ministries as well as ITU mobilize enough efforts to create and standardize on new indicators, and mobilize regulators and operators to gather these additional statistics.
Next Steps: The colloquium concluded with all above action items. It is not very clear how these would be implemented systematically. However it is expected that all participants would go back home and focus on at least one action item in their own environment and start mobilizing resources towards implementation. The ten regional resource centers will have a critical role in further shaping of regional/national agenda.
More efforts will be made in the future to mobilize the media and the entertainment industry on the issue of engendering sciences and ICTs, and there are ongoing efforts to mobilize the foundations on this problem.
Finally, as all networks and volunteer-based groups have no way to enforce implementation of an action plan, but rather rely on collaboration and knowledge sharing, the participants all committed to continue the research, advocacy and knowledge sharing to benefit the future regional centers. The question is , how sustainable is this arrangement? There are high expectations on the regional centers and their mission, staffing them with staff having the right skills mix will be critical.
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Related Articles:
eGov monitor Campaign for Women In ICT
Why are so many women and girls dropping out of sciences and technology careers? - Part I
Why are so many women and girls dropping out of sciences and technology careers? - Part II
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Disclaimer: The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Board of executive directors of the World Bank or the governments it represents. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work"
For more information, or comments, email: smelhem@worldbank.org
