A young girl

While growing up as a young girl, several girls my age had this unvoiced mentality impeded in them that a woman's place is in the kitchen doing household chores. These mentality which is deeply rooted in our patriarchal cultural belief system, was very disempowering for most of these girls, as it dampened their aspiration to pursue certain professional career path in life.
For me, I never saw much difference between the potentials of a male to that of a female. I believed they are both human, have equal opportunities and capabilities. So, I wasn’t intimidated to pursue a course in Engineering, a course that was male dominated. As time went, gradually I began to see more women take up the challenge and apply for these professional courses . This was a good encouragement to women but the ratio of women in these career paths to that of men is still minimal.
I was invited to give a talk at a young women camp on “the role of ICT in your career” sometime last year. This talk was geared towards sensitizing young women to embrace the use of ICT tools to enhance whatever career path they choose to follow and also to bridge the gap in gender digital divide. It was at the camp that I got a better understanding of the inequality women experience at work due to their gender.
The thought of the imbalances in gender digital divide fueled my interest in working with a women’s human right organization, to keep women informed about online resources that deals with women human rights issues because I believe information is powerful to bring about a positive change. I want to see more women overcome the fear of terming technology has a difficult thing to know or see it as a male’s world.
When I learnt of the ‘VOICE OF OUR FUTURE’ program I was glad to apply for it because I saw it as an avenue that will avail me of the opportunity of using the various tools of web 2.0 to:
• Learn from other women’s experiences on certain challenges they are faced with in their community and how they were able to overcome such challenges.
• Learning how to effectively write articles with the help of the mentors that will be attached to each participant that will convey the actual message to the reader.
• Learn how to effect an advocacy campaign to create positive change in my community via the use of Web 2.0