ICT sector demands the full involvement of enterprising ladies - Minister

Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, says the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector demands the full involvement of enterprising and well-positioned ladies to impact society.

She said the Ministry would continue to pursue innovative ways of bridging the digital gender divide as fast as it could.

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful was speaking at the closing ceremony of the maiden ICT workshop for female tertiary students for the Girls-in-ICT tertiary programme in Accra.

The training is aimed at giving the Girls exposure that opens them to the world of possibilities through ICTs.

Some of the participants, who performed well in their assigned projects were rewarded with Huawei products like Huawei tablets.

The first prize went to Miss Daisy Mensah, who received GHS4000, followed by Miss Bridgette Akua Anese, GHS2000, Miss Esther Aboagyewaa Anankwa and Benedicta received GHS1000 each.

The Minister said, “I believe that this training workshop is timely and could not have taken place at a better time than this, right after training a thousand girls between the ages of 10 and 16 from upper primary to JSS 2 in the Western North Region.”

She said this was the maiden training provided for the tertiary level, adding, “we aware very much aware that the demand at the tertiary level is just as high, so we, therefore, intend to go on a larger scale going forward as we obtain more funding.”

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said the facilitators from Huawei took the students through concepts such as Deep Learning, Machine Learning and Cloud with support from the National Cyber Security Centre also facilitating a presentation on Cyber Security and Cyber Hygiene, which was critical especially knowing that these days everything was done the phones as majority surf the internet.

“We must push ourselves strategically as ladies/women to be able to compete effectively in this ‘male dominated’ sector to assume our place as co-equals with our male counterparts,” she said.

AI projects topics students pitched include soil fertility and seed viability tester, pest and crop diseases control, smart irrigation, Unihealth and Digi parl.

She commended Huawei Technologies (Ghana) S.A. Limited for their commitment to the initiative.

The Minister called on Ghanaians to endeavour to register their SIM Cards with their National Identification Cards (Ghana Card), urging them to participate to ensure that “we continue to keep our SIM cards and also weed out fraudulent activities within the mobile space.”

Madam Jenny Zhou, Director, Public and Government Affairs for Huawei Technologies in Ghana, said the training had been successful and impactful, seeing young ladies from various disciplines put together their ideas to compete on one of the high demand courses in the tech space, Al.

She called on the girls to make the best of every opportunity that came their way, urging them to be motivated to do more and learning to improve upon themselves.

She congratulated the winners and said she was looking forward to seeing some of them take part in their seeds for the future programme next month.

“Huawei is proud to see many ladies successfully complete the training. Many have been inspired, exposed and mentored,” Madam Zhou said.