Learning how to code changed Baratang Miya's life.
Miya is the founder and head of GirlHype, a non-profit that empowers disadvantaged young women and girls to connect to the digital world, learn how to write code and build a career in tech.
Miya tells SciDev.Net that her message to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in December was that women must be included in internet governance to ensure that girls and women are not left behind.
Why focus on technology? What can coding offer girls and women that other fields can't?
You learn problem solving … and it builds girls' tenacity and resilience. They learn how to program and set content, you can't get that anywhere else. They live in these environments where the problems exist, and problems create opportunities. Somebody's looking out and says "there's a lot of issues in Africa." I'm looking at it and feeling like, "wow, so many opportunities in Africa and they need to be solved."
One graduate who stands out for me is a girl from Khayelitsha, a little town in South Africa. She came from poverty. She learnt HTML, CSS, went on to Python, and Java became her best language. She went straight from high school at age 18 to work for Microsoft as an intern. Within two years, she was living in one of the high suburbs of South Africa. Seeing her changing her whole family's life was mind-blowing.
Continue reading: https://phys.org/news/2022-02-women-leaders-internet.html
Miya is the founder and head of GirlHype, a non-profit that empowers disadvantaged young women and girls to connect to the digital world, learn how to write code and build a career in tech.
Miya tells SciDev.Net that her message to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in December was that women must be included in internet governance to ensure that girls and women are not left behind.
Why focus on technology? What can coding offer girls and women that other fields can't?
You learn problem solving … and it builds girls' tenacity and resilience. They learn how to program and set content, you can't get that anywhere else. They live in these environments where the problems exist, and problems create opportunities. Somebody's looking out and says "there's a lot of issues in Africa." I'm looking at it and feeling like, "wow, so many opportunities in Africa and they need to be solved."
One graduate who stands out for me is a girl from Khayelitsha, a little town in South Africa. She came from poverty. She learnt HTML, CSS, went on to Python, and Java became her best language. She went straight from high school at age 18 to work for Microsoft as an intern. Within two years, she was living in one of the high suburbs of South Africa. Seeing her changing her whole family's life was mind-blowing.
Continue reading: https://phys.org/news/2022-02-women-leaders-internet.html
