Expanding my Project and Reaching Out to Girls in the South West Region of Cameroon.

I am expanding myDigital Action Campaign, sharing the work I am doing on social media and sharing the video I produced, as a result I have received a lot of invites to train girls in other towns in Cameroon.

Given my financial limitations it has not been possible to respond to all the requests. Since then I have been searching for funding opportunities to make this possible.

“Bring a Girl to STEM” is a Cameroon based campaign to give girls ages 10 to 25 equal access to opportunities to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)#STEM4Girls

This is an important issue because girls shy away from STEM education due tothe pre-conception that STEMfields are ‘for boys’. This leadsto fewer womenchoosingSTEM creating a wide gender disparity in the field and the opportunities it provides. #Mentors4Change

Thanks to the kind collaboration and partnership between CYEED https://www.facebook.com/cyeedngo/, Rose Academies headed by Susan Linda Stasi and Hope for the Vulnerable and Orphans (HOVO), a vocational training center for women headed by our World Pulse sister Feka Parchbelle, we were able to put some resources together for me to make the trip and organize a capacity building training for our girl in Tiko, a town in the South West Region of Cameroon. https://www.facebook.com/HOVOCAM/

We took advantage of the World Youth Skills Day 2017 Celebration to train 20 girls how to use their smart phones and laptops to create a positive impact in their lives and their communities by using digital tools to raise their voices.

On the 15th July 2017, we celebrated the World Youth Skills Day using the global hash tags #SkillsForAll and #WYSD. This is a day used to raise awareness about the importance of youth developing skills. We joined World Skills and the United Nations, to raise awareness about the importance of youth developing skills in our community.

This training was free of charge for the underprivileged girls at HOVO. We had a 3 hours training session on the following:

• Building self-esteem, boy- girl relationships and entrepreneurship development handled by Feka Parchibelle who is a gender expert and female activist.
• Hands- on training on exploring technology, using social media for branding, joining on line forums such World Pulse: A social media for social revolution, where they can share their stories and seek solutions to issues that affect them most and accessing free online resources to train themselves handled by myself.

It was very exciting to train girls who were eager to learn. The questions they asked were very thrilling, we discovered that they need more lessons. I observed that, these girls have capacity and passion to imagine and create but they are not informed about latest technological innovations.

Most special on this day was that 3 girls who are volunteers at HOVO we able to launch their businesses on line.

We asked the girls to take the message about STEM to theirparents/guardians and as well share with their friends so to spread the opportunities.

Hopefully with some financial assistance we will organize more trainings for young women. Presently we have the challenge of getting internet air time and equipment.

At the end of the day we felt very satisfied because the day was worthy. So far, I can confidently say that Bring a Girl to STEM campaign has been a great success in Cameroon.

Every day I am going closer to some of my goals:

• To widen our reach to recruit students and mentors that will enable my team to scale up our outreach to replicate the program in other towns in Cameroon.
• Inspiring girls to attend the programs and get excited about STEM fields
• To build partnership and capturing the attention of companies that might be interested in becoming partners, sponsors, etc.
• Raising awareness to the life changing opportunities available to our girls

We are planning to open a digital empowerment training center in Southwest Region of Cameroon next year. We are inviting donations like office furniture, books and references, white boards, LCD, even fairly used laptops, printer, voice recorder, camera etc or financial assistance for office space and internet credit.

Once more special thanks to World Pulse for offering me the great opportunity to be one of the participants of the Advanced Digital Changemakers program 2017.