Empowering Girls to become self-reliant.

Girls in ICT is a project to teach girls who dropped out of school due to different problems to learn basic and advance computer skills.

Women and girls capture the big percentage in the Rwandan population, according to the provisional results of the recently conducted General Population and Housing Census. The survey, which was based on 2012 figures shows that women make up 51.8 percent of Rwandan 10.5 million inhabitants while males account for 48.2 percent.In Rwanda, there are a high number of girls who dropped out of school due to different problems and those girls live in the miserable life after the school. Again, because of culture, girls cannot find a job as boys after the school and girls decide to stay at home.

Accessing to information transform lives. Women’s access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is an essential tool for them to learn and have ability to improve their life standards.  Access to the Internet can help women access the information from all over the world, breakout of isolation which is a common problem youth and women face, and be able to stand and benefit from the use of technology as research shows that; when women and youths’ technological empowerment makes them active participants in seeking solutions from ICT developmental issues impacting their families, communities, societies and the whole country in general.

This Project Will help girls to come up with projects which can be financed and supported by financial institutions. . Girls will be given certificates in partnership with the ICT and Minister of Education which can help them to look for jobs e.g. in cyber café. Again, girls will be given enhance to pitch their business proposals to help them to find funds to start their business in their communities. Business like cyber café where people can go to read email and pay small fee. 

Coming to class on time, asking questions in class. - Attendence of the girls

Business to develop - Business idea

- Companies or organization to partner with

- Financial institution to support girls' projects - Girls get jobs,

Girls starts their business

This project is here to turn walls into an opportunity. Girls who dropped out of school do not have hope for the future. The Project, which does the same thing like what we are doing, they are targeting girls who graduated from the university or high school and sometimes have ways of living. This solution is to work with young girls who do not have hope for the future and help them to learn and create jobs to change their lives and live for others. We want to use ICT to empower girls to become active citizens in the community. 

Apart from helping girls to start their own business, or getting jobs in the ICT industries or companies. This project will also help girls to see that, the ICT is not for boys as some girls think ICT skills is for boys. We are expecting to have more students in the next cohort because now the girls have identified that even girls can learn ICT and use it as a tool to change their lives. Again, this project will act as motivation for other girls who thought ICT is for boys and increase their confidence to participate in ICT careers. 

This solution will help girls who dropped out school and others who finished the high school and failure to get a chance to continue their studies at the university level or higher institute of learning to have access to the quality education. Students ‘access training for free and this program is designed near their community where it is easy for them to attend the program. Because those girls come from low income families and it is would be very hard for them to pay for training /transportation cost. This project is near their community where it is accessible for them. 

We have started this project on June 22, 2017 and from then, we finance all the expenses related to this project. Before we started the project, we create budgets for the whole project and each member of the project provided contribution to help this project goes well. Our financial capacity was not enough to continue doing this the way we had planned before and this has made us to adjust some of the activities we planned before. We as a team, we managed to contribute $500 and our budget was $33k because we planned to offer loans to girls who have good projects and pay back with small interest. Each member of the organization provides monthly contribution to help the organization to continue running their activities. The members of the organization are students and they use their few financial resources to finance the project. Monthly contribution is between 5-6 USD. 

Financial incapacity is one of the problems that we are facing. We budgeted to run this solution with $33k, but our own contribution was not even a half of it. Our training require students to have computers because it is very hard to teach programming, electronics and other programs without computers. Our students are not having full access to the computer and this is a big challenge to us, but we have worked hard and create partnerships with the Kepler tech lab to help with computers. Our goal was to use little resources we have to make different…

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I am applying to solve because I believe solve will help me to take this project to the next level. The solver will connect me with experienced people who have experience in community development projects and help me to drive this project to the next level. I personally and my team we have skills and experience, but we are looking for more skills and experience to help this project reach to many beneficiaries.  

Kepler Tech Lab.

Dot Rwanda,

Technoserve.