WomEng

WomEng has worked to support women and girls all along the STEM value chain with a particular focus on the engineering and tech industry. We believe that is where the greatest impact can happen, as engineers are designer of our physical and virtual worlds. Without women at those design tables, we will continue to live in an unequal world. We have dedicated 15 years to building this dream. I am applying for the prize as we look to scale our operations. We have an ambitious target to support 1 million girls by giving them access to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) by training local ambassadors in communities to become champions and support for these girls. We have to date trained 200 ambassadors who have created impact where its needed the most, but the socio-economic issues coupled with Covid has made it difficult for ambassadors. The funding would be used to advance the 1 Million Girls in STEM programme and truly support our vision. We believe that a girls is born with unlimited potential but unequal opportunity, especially in Africa. No child should be left behind from access to STEM, especially as it is a core skill for the future. 

I am an engineer, and while I was completing my undergrad degree, I faced harassment and discrimination in engineering. I wanted to leave and realised that if women all stayed silent and left the industry nothing would change, but also that the industry needed diverse engineers to create better, more equitable and inclusive solutions. So I started WomEng, along with my co-founder to support young women as we transitioned into engineering. I did this as a volunteer programme, built a volunteer team, and had a dual career, as both an engineer and a NGO leader. As an engineer, worked on mega infrastructure projects, including rolling out public transport and climate change mitigation. However, we were starting to scale WomEng, and realised we needed to build an entire ecosystem in Africa, by attracting girls into engineering, supporting university students around innovation and entrepreneurship, supporting female leadership and female founders. We quit our jobs and built this full time. The recession hit and our funding was cut. We spun out a company called WomHub to bring financial sustainability. We know work from attraction to ownership and building the ecosystem, looking at how we build sustainable outcomes. I remain passionate about engineering society.

Women in engineering are still grossly under-represented. Women engineering graduates are still below 20%, globally while the number of women in the sector hovers around 11% with ownership of the sector by women being lower.  Engineering is a profoundly creative profession dependent on our life experiences and the ability to solve some of the greatest challenges including the SDGs. However, with limited women at the design table the creation of our physical and virtual worlds are not inclusive. We thus are not creating worlds for women to thrive. Women make up 52% of the population and are considered the world’s most powerful consumers, controlling 70-80% of all consumer purchasing power but are neglected in engineering design, board levels, research and development and leadership. Engineering a better future requires a stronger presence of women in engineering to provide holistic and targeted inclusive solutions. WomEng has built an entire ecosystem to support awareness of STEM careers for girls, the development of female university students with employability and entrepreneurship skills, leadership development for women in industry and entrepreneurship develop to support female founders in STEM. We work from attraction to ownership across multiple countries around the world. 

WomEng is unique in that it has taken a pipeline approach to build out a solution to challenge of attraction, development, retention and ownership in STEM. We have created targeted interventions all along the value chain as girls transition from STEM subjects, to STEM careers, to ownership. We have built a unique scalable model that we have replicated in a number of countries in Africa. Prior to Covid we ran most of our training and development programmes in person. However, we started a GoDigital strategy in December 2019, to support the online support and building a thriving global Women in STEM community. Since then, we have converted all our programmes to virtual or hybrid, and have created low bandwidth programmes to ensure that no girl gets left behind because there is limited access to digital solutions and the cost of data in our region is really high. We  continue to innovate and build out our programme by a team of female engineers who now run our programmes and operations full time. We are tackling socio-economic and deep-rooted biases for women in STEM in Africa and beyond. 

Ultimately, we are looking to create an impact in the world by changing who designs our physical and virtual worlds. However, we have different impacts, based on the various points within our pipeline. At the Girl programme, we want to create awareness around STEM careers for 1 million girls. We have already seen around 50 000 girls on the programmes to date and trained 200 ambassadors. We still have a long way to go. This is scaling wide. Scaling deep, we currently tracking the career paths of over 80 female engineers, who have gone on to be those designers of better systems and more inclusive infrastructure. These engineers have specifically started with us at the high school level. We have worked and trained over 3000 female university students some have gone on to work for our clients, and a few have started their own companies including drone technology, and companies in the bigger tech ecosystem, delivering medicine and healthcare to rural areas in Malawi We have worked with over 100 female founders, and have supported their businesses. Ultimately, we want to close the gap on the sustainable development goals and every engineer & Future engineer through our programme achieves this