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SAP supports female digital empowerment initiative in Ghana

12 Feb 2019, 03:30 pm
Financial Nigeria
SAP supports female digital empowerment initiative in Ghana

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The FemITI initiative promotes digital literacy among young girls in Ghana and trains them in STEM-related courses.

SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany

SAP, a German multinational software company, and DreamOval Foundation, a Ghanaian non-profit, have concluded the first edition of FemITI, an initiative that promotes females in technology.

The FemITI initiative promotes digital literacy among young girls in Ghana and also trains them in courses related to Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The aim of FemITI is to enable girls in Ghana to develop problem-solving skills through STEM and IOT training, and ultimately improve the country's competitiveness and productivity.

According to DreamOval, some of the courses taught to the girls include skills and knowledge in coding, electronics, embedded systems, internet cloud systems & applications, and product design & design thinking.

"Our support for FemiTI is in line with our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially as they related to Gender Equality (#5) and Quality Education (#4) and aligns well with our broader activities to bring more women into the digital fold," Cathy Smith, Managing Director at SAP Africa, said in a statement released on Tuesday by the market leader in enterprise application software.

Quoting a report by the World Wide Web Foundation, an international non-profit, SAP said women in poor urban areas in developing countries are 50 percent less likely to use the Internet than men. According to other reports, 75 percent of girls in Ghana attend primary school, but there is a significant dropout rate among girls in high school and college. The DreamOval Foundation believes this challenge can be addressed by presenting STEM in an exciting way through FemITI and empowering females through digital literacy.

"We believe in empowering women in the 21st century as they play a key role in the development process,” Francis Ahene-Affoh, Senior Vice President at the DreamOval Foundation, said. “We identified these girls from underprivileged communities who can be empowered digitally to become problem-solvers for their communities."


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