Girls and Technology: Bridging the Gap

At the end of April, I had the opportunity to co-moderate a discussion on Clubhouse for the first time - with Jumoke Adegbonmire of WillFran Consulting - on the topic “Educational Technology for Girls in Africa.”

The Current Landscape:

The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to the educational system across the world has been well-discussed and covered over the last year. The results that are emerging (and that will continue to for years to come, many experts suspect) are that students attending well-funded schools tended to fare better. Many of such schools has already invested in the technology infrastructure and systems that enabled them to transition more easily to online mode of learning. It doesn’t mean that it was a totally smooth process, but at least the schools had the equipment already in place, their students were fairly comfortable already using these tools for their school work and they had the required internet and devices at home to enable their learning online.

Then, we saw schools at the other end of the spectrum, with no or severely limited access to any form of technology. Such schools were typically (at least in Nigeria) publicly-funded or low-cost income schools with students whose parents were more from the low to lower-middle class economic strata. In such schools, learning came to a complete halt. Some of these schools were able to get back-up offering a mixture of more accessible digital tools and platforms, such as WhatsApp.

Some Nigerian state governments implemented a system of teaching via radio and television. These were all very well-intentioned, though did not account for the millions of students who lacked constant electricity to enable them access these teachings. And then learning is a two-way street: information is passed to the learner and then the instructor confirms that the student has understood what is being taught. Radio and TV do not really offer the opportunity to do the latter, unless perhaps they are being used under the supervision of an instructor who the students have direct access to.

The Challenges:

Participants in the room shared their own experiences working around the challenges posed by the pandemic. I talked about the experiences of the Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre (W.TEC) implementing our programmes during the schools shut-down.

In our W.TEC Academy programmes (a weekly after-school technology club implemented pre-COVID for over 200 students in 12 schools across Kwara State and for 120 students in 2 schools in Ogun State), we were able to only continue working with 23 students in Kwara and none in Ogun.

And most of the girls we worked with in Kwara State were not part of our Academy programme, rather they were girls who had the required internet-enabled devices that learning virtually required.

This was a common experience among members of our room and so the discussion shifted to ways to address this access gap.

Dr. Olusola, a Nigerian researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa spoke about the importance of advocacy efforts to secure donations of needed infrastructure for public schools especially. This led to us exploring how easy such advocacy efforts were. In many African countries, access to the government is not always easy and even when relationships are established with key personnel, a change in administration could mean that relationships have to be cultivated with the new public officials. This pointed to the importance of engaging on the policy level – rather than on a micro level – to ensure that education and especially technology infrastructure and access are prioritised by legal backing.

The we examined what other obstacles were limiting girls access to and use of technology for learning and this led to the discussion of how less likely girls were than boys to have access to or use technology. And then how, in turn, girls were less likely to study STEM subjects in school.

Factors identified as contributing to this gap included stereotypes of technology being better-suited for men and a lack of visible female technology role models.

Rose of She Codes for Change, a nonprofit in Tanzania working to bridge the gender gap in technology, shared how good Maths scores are a pre-requisite to studying many technology subjects and how there is a huge perception of maths as being a difficult subject. If girls don’t think they will do well in Maths, they were less likely to pick courses of study in university that required Maths.

The Way Forward:

Winifred Ereyi of Women in Technology International (WITI) talked about how she was encouraged to pursue STEM careers primarily because they had the good fortune to meet women who were able to show how Science and Engineering were linked to their everyday play activities, such as building pretend houses, cooking and baking and exploring puddles and streams in the neighbourhood.

It is obvious that it is crucial to have teachers and role models who are able to bring STEM to life and connect it to girls’ realities. With many teachers going through an educational system that promotes rote learning, they are not always equipped to feed students’ curiousity and support their learning in this way.

Encouraging girls to want to study STEM-related subjects is just one part of the journey. Supporting women so they succeed and stay in STEM careers requires thoughtful and strategic planning.

Bernadette of Cameroon (now based in Germany) shared how in her experience, many women turn down work projects that would bring deeper learning and opportunities for professional advancement if they believe these will clash with their abilities to be a “good mother and wife”, which they frequently equate to having the time to devote to their family-centered activities. So many women start to back away from accepting these projects and opportunities, what Sheryl Sandberg called “leaning away.”

It’s obvious that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to levelling the playing field for girls and women in the technology and STEM landscape. It’s also apparent that a long-term, strategic, multi-sectoral approach is needed.

So each of us in the space will continue to do our bit as hope that gradually, we reach that tipping point where our respective efforts snowball into a cascading waterfall of change.