Angela Kyerematen-Jimoh: Supporting women who fuel Africa’s future
The past year has been very challenging, from the stress of living through a global pandemic to the various lockdown restrictions that have kept us indoors.
But, amidst this tough phase, we have also witnessed moments
worth celebrating. In the past few months, we saw Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala become
both the first woman as well as the first African to serve as WTO’s
director-general. Whilst in Tanzania, we saw Samia Suluhu Hassan being sworn in
as the African states first female president. Across the continent, we are
seeing more women leading movements for inclusivity, equality and justice –
reshaping Africa’s legacy.
While change has been incremental, we still need a
breakthrough. Our recent IBM IBV Study suggests that more programmes haven’t
translated to more progress. With the impact of COVID-19, women will be our
biggest casualties as progress for women at work could be back to 2017 levels
by the end of 2021. While a small group is leading the effort to close the
prevailing gender gap across the continent, there is a growing need to go
beyond what’s being done now; actively build women in the workforce and create
supportive cultures even when the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us.
My work affords me the privilege of meeting and listening to
some very inspiring women who are helping bring about significant changes using
technology. As I interact with them and watch them, I realize that we all need
to be intentional about promoting women at the workplace. That is an important
start, but for full and effective participation we first have to make sure our
young women develop a keen interest in technology and science-related subjects
at an early age.
Cultivating an interest in science and technology
Research shows that unless we change various cultural and
behavioural drivers within organizations, the matter is unlikely to be resolved
any time soon. In South Africa, the proportion of females to males who graduate
with STEM-related (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees is
out of kilter. Developer Advocate at IBM in South Africa and Scrum Master for
Student Experience within IBM Z, Phila Phungula is aware of this disparity and
comments that the lack of women in final year classes is a continued sight in
the universities she interacts with.
As an IBM Z technical specialist, Phila represents one of
the 30% of professionals in the technology industry in sub-Saharan Africa.
Today she leads the charge to expose students to IBM technologies – giving them
insights into emerging technologies such as blockchain and Microservices,
helping them develop coding skills. She understands the need for community and
has built a meetup page with over 600 members (most of them industry
developers) across South Africa, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia. The hackathons
she hosts are designed to give students an entry into technology – cultivating
and nurturing the interest that led her on this career path and closing the gap
between women and men in exploring careers in technology. In fact, she will
also be speaking at the Women in Tech World Series.
The future of Africa relies on a solid pipeline of women in
STEM
The lack of women in our classrooms also impacts on the
number of women in our boardrooms. An IBM study shows that only 1 in 4 global
organizations have made gender equity a business priority – and there are now
fewer women in the pipeline to fill senior executive roles than there were in
2019.
Globally, women make up less than 30% of the world’s
researchers and these numbers are perhaps lower when we consider minority
women. If we are to ever increase the number of women in leadership in STEM and
tech-related fields to reflect the population of the world (almost 50-50
men-women) then, it also means we have to increase the pipeline of women and
especially minorities that enter STEM fields, pursue advanced degrees, and
eventually pursue careers in it.
In Kenya, our research champion, Charity Wayua and her team
are taking in computer science interns who are interested in research –giving
them firsthand experience in publication writing, mentorship and supporting
them with daily interactions with researchers. The objective is to make them
strong candidates for a competitive and changing environment. By the time they
apply for a PhD program, they will have several publications and patents under
their belt, along with on-the-job experience. Such programmes help many
individuals, especially women, overcome any STEM career barriers.
Women are leveraging new age technology to solve the
continent’s unsolvable problems
As new technologies are introduced at a rapid pace, the
dynamics will change. We could expose young women and those in the workplace to
new technologies – sending them down the rabbit hole of discovering technology
and science and changing the course of our economy now and far into the future.
For Amira Abbas, a Research scientist at the IBM Research
Lab in Johannesburg, new technologies such as quantum are actually driving
diversity and collaboration. She comments that the quantum community is still
very young and diverse with a good number of female colleagues. She sees an
exponential interest in quantum, driven by an increasingly open and
collaborative environment.
While gender stereotypes often deter women from careers in
technology, Amira is part of a growing number of researchers who are women at
IBM Research Africa. Her work is about tackling what we might have seen as
previously unsolvable problems and exploring capabilities and use cases of
quantum on the continent. Amira is part of the new breed in our science and
research community, focused on progressing the continent’s development agenda
through exponential technology. She has set out to create better models in
machine learning – work, which when applied to the power of quantum computing
can help us create new medicine and even financial models.
Aisha Walcott-Bryant, also a member of our Africa Lab based
in Nairobi, recently worked on a project introducing the Worldwide
Non-pharmaceutical Interventions Tracker for COVID-19 (WNTRAC) — a
comprehensive dataset consisting of more than 6,000 NPIs across 261 countries
and territories, now publicly available for free, for non-commercial use and
frequently updated to ensure the most up-to-date information. She hopes that
the dataset is valuable for policymakers, public health leaders, and
researchers in modeling and analysis efforts for helping control the spread of
COVID-19. The project was recently published in Nature – Scientific Data.
This move, away from the traditional and conservative ways
of doing tasks, is what will push the continent into a better future – led by
exceptional women who are committed to reshaping Africa’s legacy in a
post-COVID-19 world.
If our goal is to empower the whole of Africa and contribute
to equity and inclusive development as we build a digital future, we need to
make sure that women are not left behind in the continent’s story of growth.
Source: Angela Kyerematen-Jimoh - Regional General Manager
for IBM North, East and West Africa
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