TECH THE POW(H)ER

In France nowadays, 300 000 young women from the projects have been NEET for more than a year. 

Strikingly and despite of the job opportunities,  they are invisible in the promising STEM fields. 

As an answer to both this lack of representation of young women and the precariousness of whole urban territories, Tech the Pow(h)er aims at reaching and sensitizing to STEM opportunities, and at training women in low-income areas for high-valued tech jobs.

Our method is based on “proportionate pedagogy”. It is an inclusive, custom-builded approach, delivering a technical education, as well as cross-curricular competencies, much valued by hiring companies.  Our method has proven to be successful in struggling for professional and social reintegration through sustainable employment in STEM.

In a world in crisis tending to lead to even greater inequities, we empower women to build a better future for themselves and for their communities as a whole.

Within the challenge “Learning for girls and women”, we are solving the issue of territorial and gender exclusion from professional and therefore social integration.

In France for instance, a dramatic 51% of the NEET are women and  45,6% of the NEET are young people from the projects. Out of the 2 million youngsters from the french projects, 1 in 3 has never graduated from high school, nor have they been given a professional education. 

This worldwide education and employment crisis in precarious urban areas, is even more a predicament, since 50% of the people living there are less than 25 years old,  left at the margins of society. The current situation is largely due to the overrepresentation of a vulnerable working class with poor education, severely exposed to unemployment and poverty.

We have identified STEM fields as opportunities for these young unemployed women looking to improve their living conditions. In the new digital era, it is required that all categories of the population are part of the world in the making. We can not afford not to diversify the contributions to it, and we believe women from destitute areas can be empowered to build tech for communities solutions.

Our solution is a comprehensive free 6-months coding and cross-curricular bootcamp, for young women from low-income urban areas, namely 75 million around the world.

Tech the Pow(h)er gives them the tools to be efficient and confident in a predominantly male work or study environment . To meet this challenge, we train them to develop technical competencies in programming, as well as leadership skills. The modules of the training consist in exercising collective intelligence and develop technical digital abilities by:

- Discovering how local tech job opportunities exist for them and which are their requirements. In this phase, each woman is confronted to a diverse array of opinions as to the relevance of their professional projects.

- Being introduced to digital free tools that are essential to “electronic literacy”  and very much used in nowadays work environment: Slack, Zapier, Github.

- Being taught web programming, and challenged to create relevant, innovative web pages. Those achievable and custom-designed courses encompass HTML, JavaScript, Python. 

-Participating in leadership workshops in which women challenge each other in real-life conflictual professional situations.

-Profiting from individual employment training

-Being part of a hackathon that promotes tech for local good solutions, in partnership with local hiring tech companies.

Our typical beneficiary is a young woman in charge, in whole or in part, of the family’s revenue. She is 16 to 24 yo and looking for a way to improve her living conditions. When employed, she occupies low-income and underappreciated jobs. She struggles to make ends meet, but believes an opportunity could eventually come up.

In the french-speaking world, 17 million destitute young women share the same resilience and are familiar with that french proverb saying “Being successful is going from a failure to another without losing one’s enthusiasm.” That’s exactly what coding requires: resilience.

We understand their needs, because we ourselves are women raised in the french precarious urban areas, and we try daily to understand the surrounding obstacles to their integration. Local employment public services are strategic partners allowing us to detain data we can use to validate our intuitions and put together local and relevant inclusion strategies.

We reach and engage these young women by  first sensitizing them, and then encouraging collective intelligence and co-construction habits throughout the whole project. At the end of the experience, they will be able to be the lead(h)ers that voice and implement strong solutions for their local community.

Only 8% of our public engaged in education or retraining, is trained for STEM jobs. Despite this unequal access, studies agree diversity is key for companies’ performance. Our solution effectively responds to the challenge because it displays digital capacity-building activities for this targeted population.  

Our inclusive “proportionate pedagogy” is co-constructed with our learners, and has been showing encouraging results for professional and social reintegration. Our bootcamp is replicable as such, in all disadvantaged urban areas where barriers of quality education are always significant. Acting for the development of local fabrics, we ensure both a social and territorial positive impact.

The core value proposition provided by Tech the Pow(h)er worldwide bootcamps, is the comprehensive local implementation. Indeed, we tackle young women, home and community environment needs. We also seek the aid of local public or associative institutions for employment and economic growth, to source destitute young women and decipher their community circumstances. Then we target local tech companies by supporting and advising them regarding their diverse workforce hiring policies. This encompassing approach is key for well-designed development initiative, through women education and sustainable employment. Understanding complex environment and promoting social dialogue with all stakeholders, is our main asset.

The Proportionate Pedagogy that we have built up and promoted,  relies on taking into account the immediate social, economic and cultural environment, as well as the individual problems, in order to co-define the organization and content of the programs. This innovative, woman-centered approach has proven to limitate the dropout rate, and to avoid putting the young women back in a situation of failure.

Coding bootcamps for destitute young women do exist around the globe and among Solve challengers, but they can’t be complete if there are no courses offered on leadership and professional know-how-to-be. The lack of cross-curricular competencies is obvious for our beneficiaries,  and we know they are very much valued by hiring companies. 

And eventually, we offer an immediate professional visibility and integration opportunities through the regional Hackathon we organize at the end of each and every Tech the Pow(h)er’s bootcamp.

The core solution underlining Tech the Pow(h)er activities, is coding, computer science. 

We are putting forward a new process, by adapting our french, home-made digital education to the needs of vulnerable young women from poverty-stricken urban spaces around the world. We increase our impact by tooling them to build tech for good solutions, directed towards their own communities.

The targeting of urban environments is key in our process. In fact, to have better impact in professionally and socially reintegrating our public, we need to make sure they belong to an environnement displaying both companies offering STEM jobs opportunities, and a dense network of public or associative services dealing with employment or economic growth. 

Our simplified and custom-designed programs, are enhanced with cross-curricular competencies. Our capacity building approach is comprehensive and we make a determined stand to reveal family and community lead(h)ers, through coding and leadership expertise, and in the end, sustainable employment in STEM fields. 

Our beneficiaries are well initiated to various software technologies related to code. The digital journey that we make available to our learners, is fully relevant in the light of the digital revolution in the making. Based on the feedbacks we will get from our stakeholders, we would be likely to propose this quality learning online, in order to develop accessibility and increase our potential for impact. This feature is possible thanks to our partner IBM and its certified hard and soft skills platform we have been granted access to.

Coding has proven effectiveness in reintegrating vulnerable populations.

Since 2018, we have piloted our solution in the Paris region and the social outcomes were above our expectations. We first sensitize 500 women to tech job opportunities, in collaboration with the French public service for employment. Among those 500 beneficiaries, 289 confirmed their professional projects, 167 have been successfully led to digital training ,and we kept 15 of them to test our Proportionate Pedagogy during coding and cross-curricular classes. 

It came out that coding courses, when co-constructed with the learners and enhanced with softkills are a formidable tool for integration. The women we have been working with, have developed self-confidence, they now dare to voice their opinions amid the learning community and strongly contribute in sharing technical solutions to coding bugs in online workgroups. The very talented ones have proven they can conceptualize and lead tech for good solutions for the community, and the hiring partners are now very interested in those profiles.

We have built a professional and social scale to measure how strong our impact is in local communities. And it appeared that Tech the Pow(h)er scores high in terms of “community capacity” ,and for reducing the “digital and social gap”. The former tells about our ability to make young vulnerable women feel legitimate and important in a group dynamic, and  the latter means our ability to reach those who are the less familiar with digital technologies and who moreover, stem from the most economically enclaved areas.

Tech the Pow(h)er’s ToC starts with HR and financial inputs.

We wish to replicate the HR policy we are applying to the Paris area, France. 

Our CEO and CSO are accountable for the vision and the development strategy in all the deployment territories. Then, each region has  its own volunteers dealing with the bootcamps’ communication activities; a training director writing and adapting all the programs, and managing the external education providers; an event manager to put together the local hackathon; a public private partnership manager.

The solution is funded by public subsidies (city council, state, region, IO etc), private grants from companies’ CSR or foundations, and donations.

Our activities consist in raising funds; identifying precarious urban areas sheltering vulnerable young women, tech job opportunities and public or associative services dealing with local employment and/or economic and social growth. We then recruit and coordinate local communication volunteers who can be community leaders,  to reach and sensitize our public; we write programs for technical and cross-curricular competencies and share our unique Proportionate Pedagogy charter to the external education providers; eventually, we cultivate good relationships with local hiring companies.

The outputs for each territory are: a coding and leadership bootcamp, a tech for good local hackathon, a network of local STEM companies hiring; a public or associative network allowing us to source and decipher local economic and social circumstances.

We thus wish to replicate the following results: to have a good class participation rate; to fuel ambitions of STEM careers for young women; to increase their employability for hiring companies; to allocate competencies to tech jobs opportunities;  to professionally and socially integrate them; to have the young women abandon precarious jobs; to have them build tech solutions for their communities.

Eventually, we expect Tech the Pow(h)er to have these impacts:  dramatically decreasing the proportion of poor working women; improving the numbers in children education; making STEM fields more diverse by hiring women from destitute areas; enhancing companies’ competitiveness; fostering local economic growth; developing regional economic and scientific hubs; allowing endogenous economic growth solutions pushed forward by women.

Tech the Pow(h)er is currently serving a thousand women

and we plan to serve 10 000 in one year

and a half a million women within  five years.

Our ambition with the MIT, is to spread by replicating our solution to french-speaking countries first, and then in the whole world’s impoverished urban spaces, if our solution proves strong impacts. French-speaking countries represent 300 million people , 160 million women, -10% of whom are destitute- divided in 5 continents and 88 countries.

We have already explored and identified Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Tunisia as countries where our methods could be implemented. In this geographical scope, the same exclusion logic is at work when it comes to women in poor urban areas. Within a year, we wish to reach at least a dozen countries.

In fact, our expertise relies in our ability to source potential beneficiaries, work with local employment services and identify the local tech companies needs in terms of hiring policy. We are confident we can improve community development, especially in  french-speaking West and Center Africa, within five years. 

Indeed, after reaching financial autonomy in all the areas we will settle in, we wish to deploy by having our young beneficiaries’ education financed by hiring companies.

To bring our bootcamps in all those territories, we want to capitalize on our know-how and on the appetite of our partners and stakeholders, for the challenge of women education and sustainable employment.

The barriers for us to accomplish our goals would be financial, if we fail to enlist stakeholders and raise funds to spread our activities outside of France. We need committed stakeholders to participate in, through their CSR and philanthropic policies when it comes to companies, and when they are public institutions, through their awareness of the crucial challenges we are coping: young women poverty and miseducation, and the lack of this population’s representation in STEM jobs.

Then we could have to deal with technical issues, since a coding bootcamp requires 6-months available workspaces, and computers for all of our beneficiaries. 

Another barrier would be the lack of performance of local employment services. Indeed, to be useful to our cause, such public or associative services, need to be efficient when it comes to identifying our public and to sharing us knowledge on the local economic and social circumstances. Without being able to deploy such collaborations in the field, our solution could fail. 

Eventually, we will have to deal with cultural barriers. In the targeted territories, can young  women abandon low-income jobs or housing activities to enroll in a 6-months program? How deep is the acceptance of their emancipation in their community.

Within one year, in order not to depend on subsidiaries and donations, and to diversify our financial policy, we will need hiring companies to also finance the enrolled young women’s education. First we need to prove companies that their performance would directly benefit from a diverse recruitment, and we also need to bring prove of these young women employability, thanks to their mastering of hard and soft competencies required.

As to the technical challenges of workspaces availability and the computer equipment of the young women, we could try and replicate the model successfully used in the Paris region. In fact, we are collaborating with international tech companies to provide learners with computers, and we are approaching state institutions to raise awareness about our solution’s economic and social impacts, to be granted different free workspaces.

If the local employment or development services are unable to meet our expectations, we could base our knowledge and sourcing upon regional or subregional NGOs. These actors often have a thorough view of the local economic and social dynamics at work, and building a strong network of people on the ground is the core of their activities. 

To bring down cultural barriers, we would use the volunteering communication team made essentially by community leaders. Their goal would be to sensitize communities to the benefits of women integration and  emancipation. We can make communication supports such as a video that explains and shows by example, the economic and social benefits of empowered women in a poverty-stricken community.

We have 4 people in the full time staff: 

the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Strategy Officer, the Chief Technical Officer in charge of the training, and the public private partnerships Manager. 12 external contractors are in charge of delivering coding and cross-curricular classes. And we are lucky to rely on a 20 volunteering part-time staff that works on communication and marketing, support functions, technical training, employment training and any other activities each and every one feel interested, comfortable and experienced enough to take part in.

The cofounding team has been working together since 2017.  

Souad has been herself raised in the projects near Paris, and knows well about lacking professional integration opportunities or not being considered legitimate to do “a man’s job”. After 10 years in the banking industry, she decided to join a coding retraining program, and she had her intuition confirmed: no one but her was a woman from low-income areas. Immediately, she decided to create DesCodeuses non profit community, and had since been its beating heart.

 When Jessia met Souad, it was a early morning in a parisian incubator for social structures. She had this cooking for companies lunch project and was hiring women from low-income areas, just like her, to make the lunchtime magic happen. Meeting Souad, she realized her bold proposition to break down gender and territorial barriers in the tech industry, could push destitute women of all ages , further in their emancipation and legitimacy to be part of the world in the making. Jessia graduated from the most prestigious humanities and social sciences school in France, and very soon accepted to be the head to the heart.

 Michelson is the brazilian CTO and Head of training, he has put together all the programs content and very quickly came up with the idea that “coding for these women means nothing without empowering them to be somebody at work and  to their community”. That’s how Tech the Pow(h)er comprehensive bootcamps were born within DesCodeuses. Led by heart, head, legs.

We have partnered with various organizations to be our financial or technical support, to share our mutual knowledge on our expertise territories.

We have established corporate partnerships in order to obtain skills patronage and recruiting opportunities for our beneficiaries with SAP.io , BNP Paribas, CAP Gemini, PwC, Google France, Societe Generale and RAJA.

We have also made partnerships with french public institutions for funding sponsorship : City of Paris, Paris Region, Ministry of Labour.

To address key challenges of learning for girls and women, bringing diversity in STEM fields, and reducing poverty rates for young women around the world, we offer free coding and cross-curricular (leadership or  professional know-how-to-be skills)  bootcamps to destitute women. Delivering a free education using the bootcamp educational model -wich is short and intensive- and always adapting our programs content to our beneficiaries’ economic and social environment, are essential to bring these young women to use our solution.  

Poverty-stricken young women around the world need Tech the Pow(h)er because they seek to improve their living standards by getting a valued job that they are sure they can keep over time. Young millennial women from the destitute urban areas around the world, have aspirations for independence in every way. STEM fields education will not only make them evolve professionally in a highly promising sector, but will also allow them to understand, create and manage their own businesses on the web. Tech the Pow(h)er creates favorable conditions to build up their projects and make them come true. We reach them, inform and equip them,  educate them with hard and soft skills, and put them in touch with local hiring companies in order to achieve professional and personal development. 

Take the Pow(h)er produces lead(h)ers within their communities by delivering free tech education and scholarships for young women, thanks to the money raised with our financial partners.

Tech the Pow(h)er provides free coding and leadership classes that are financed by different stakeholders. Our educational activities are financed by public and private subsidies, and to a lesser extent, by private donations. These different actors share our core values and seek to differentiate themselves from competitors and to embody their social objectives through Tech the Pow(h)er.

We beneficiate from public subsidies from city councils, districts, states, subregions, regions, International Organizations. We are being granted subsidies when defining interesting actions for them to finance, in answering to their call for projects. They invest in our recruitment policy, structural needs or educational engineering - meaning the development of teaching material that is suited for our area of activity and beneficiaries-.

Private investors grant us with subsidies as well, through their CSR policy  and individual and private donors are also a good part of our financial stability. We offer them an alignment with the UN development objectives and a visibility on our missions. 

 Within a yearTech the Pow(h)er will rely  on an innovative business model that includes local hiring companies,  in financing the young women’s education. This is how we plan to deploy and reach financial sustainability.

DesCodeuses and Tech the Pow(h)er are applying to Solve challenge, because we share the objectives of changing millions of lives around the world. Being part of an international network will help us challenge our business model and deployment strategy. We have been successfully testing our revenue model in France, but we need support and more expertise to better tackle the professional training market in other countries, continents. 

Our first target are the french-speaking countries, because sharing a language is strategic in building up local collaborations. Nevertheless, we are confident that being part of your network could nurture the confidence to replicate Tech the Pow(h)er in english speaking countries as well. 

Moreover Solve would grant us a better legitimacy towards the communities we want to reach. For the volunteers to the project and for direct and indirect beneficiaries, we could benefit from MIT’s reputation to enhance our credibility in tech for these populations. Because trust must be established when it comes to educating and professionally integrate.

Tech the Pow(h)er will reach financial stability in 2021, but the revenue model is largely depending on public and private subsidies. To expand, we need to diversify our financials. A business partner with a strong economic culture and a visibility on our market,  would help us consider other options and build new product’s assets to go and change the world, through changing young women’s conditions. 

We need local and institutional partners to have good local media exposure and recruit talents . External education providers, learners, communication volunteers. It is paramount that we partner with the good contact people or organization to reach the same level of expertise we have in France.

To monitor and evaluate the impact of our solution, we will need to partner with expert organizations ,to help us adapt our evaluation framework to complex and new economic and social environments.

We can think of a lot of partners that could help us advance Tech the Pow(h)er. 

MIT faculty would be the first of them! Indeed, we can imagine building up exchange programs with trained young women from around the world. This partnership would be a way of increasing their appetite and ambition for STEM jobs.

Microsoft has developed a campus we could also use to help young women dream bigger. Moreover, the company has launched a program aimed at supporting non-profit organizations. 

We could also partner with Apple and benefit from their free learning program to use  Swift. And eventually, JP Morgan could be a key partner since they have now developed an investing program for the french projects.

The Innovation for Women Prize would be a great pride for us, since we are female entrepreneurs struggling on a daily basis since 2017, to make up innovative solutions to empower women to higher their expectations, and build better lives for themselves and for their communities. 

The whole Tech the Pow(h)er project relies on the belief that women should be lead(h)ers of their communities and that are key in the local economic and social development.

Coders ourselves, we have identified STEM fields as valuable opportunities for women education and employment. The underrepresentation of women in STEM industries is overwhelming. And women from destitute backgrounds, women like us, are even less represented.  However, we need them to be part of the world in the making. 

As a consequence, we made it our job and fight, to break down gender and territorial barriers in tech. To do so, we reach and sensitize destitute young women to STEM job opportunities, we equip them with computers, we train them in coding and professional softskills, and in the end, we help them build educational or work projects, by putting them in touch with female role model or local hiring companies in STEM.

Our activities are now well deployed in the Paris region, but our ambition is to reach out poverty-stricken urban areas all around the world. The Innovation for Women Prize is a great opportunity for visibility, legitimacy and for financial sustainability, and it would allow us to have greater global social impacts.

The GM Prize would be a great pride for us, since we are female entrepreneurs struggling on a daily basis since 2017, to make up innovative  educational solutions to empower women to higher their expectations, and build better lives for themselves and for their communities. 

The whole Tech the Pow(h)er project relies on the belief that women should be lead(h)ers of their communities and that are key in the local economic and social development.

Coders ourselves, we have identified STEM fields as valuable opportunities for women education and employment. The underrepresentation of women in STEM industries is overwhelming. And women from destitute backgrounds, women like us, are even less represented.  However, we need them to be part of the world in the making. 

As a consequence, we made it our job and fight, to break down gender and territorial barriers in tech. To do so, we reach and sensitize destitute young women to STEM job opportunities, we equip them with computers, we train them in coding and professional softskills, and in the end, we help them build educational or work projects, by putting them in touch with female role model or local hiring companies in STEM.

Our activities are now well deployed in the Paris region, but our ambition is to reach out poverty-stricken urban areas all around the world. The GM Prize on Learning for Girls and Women is a great opportunity for visibility, legitimacy and  financial sustainability, and it would allow us to have greater global social impacts.

The Gulbenkian Award would be a great pride for us, since we are female entrepreneurs struggling on a daily basis since 2017, to push forward digital literacy solutions to empower women to higher their expectations, and build better lives for themselves and for their communities. 

The whole Tech the Pow(h)er project relies on the belief that women should be lead(h)ers of their communities and that are key in the local economic and social development.

Coders ourselves, we have identified STEM fields as valuable opportunities for women education and employment. The underrepresentation of women in STEM industries is overwhelming. And women from destitute backgrounds, women like us, are even less represented. However, we need them to be part of the world in the making. 

As a consequence, we made it our job and fight, to break down gender and territorial barriers in tech. To do so, we reach and sensitize destitute young women to STEM job opportunities, we equip them with computers, we train them in coding and professional softskills, and in the end, we help them build educational or work projects, by putting them in touch with female role model or local hiring companies in STEM.

Our activities are now well deployed in the Paris region, but our ambition is to reach out poverty-stricken urban areas all around the world. The Gulbenkian Award for Adult Literacy is a great opportunity for visibility, legitimacy and  financial sustainability, and it would allow us to have greater global social impacts.