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1,466 applicants accepted into 2023 Women Techsters Fellowship across Africa

1,466 applicants accepted into 2023 Women Techsters Fellowship across Africa

Launched in 2021, the Women Techster Fellowship offers a year-long immersive training and experiential learning opportunity for young girls and women across the African continent to acquire deep tech skills through six months intensive training and six-month internship/mentorship.

The program is open to young girls and women between the ages of 16 to 40 drawn from 15 African countries, who will be taken through experiential technology learning and upskilling at no single cost.

The successful applicants for the 2023 Women Techsters Fellowship were selected from a pool of 14,509 completed applications, after approximately 77,000 attempted applications recorded. The total number of admitted beneficiaries equals about 10 percent of total applications.

A total of 1,167 women from Nigeria made the cut out of 10,912 who applied. Kenya with 68 had the second largest number of beneficiaries while 48 Ghanaian women were admitted into the program.

Ethiopia has 32 beneficiaries, followed by Uganda with 29, while South Africa took 24 slots for the 2022/23 calendar year.

24 Egyptian women were successful, while Mozambique 12, Madagascar 12, Tanzania 11, Algeria and Sudan have six apiece. Angola and Morocco have four students each in the program while DR Congo has a total of three students.

The women will be trained in eight areas including Mobile Development, Software Development, Product Design, Product Management, Cybersecurity, Data Science/ Artificial Intelligence Engineering, Blockchain and Mixed Reality/3D.

Speaking at the announcement press conference, Women Techsters Initiative Lead, Blessing Ashi, revealed that the process of selection was rigorous as the program requires only the best and most dedicated fellows.

We started the registration process in March 2022 and we had three stages of assessments for the beneficiaries and I can categorically say that we have selected the best based on the performance of beneficiaries across all the three stages.

“I want to say congratulations to everyone who made it this far and I hope that the skills to be acquired during this learning phase will stand you out amongst your peers. Stay true to the program and I wish you the best.

In her own remarks, the Co-founder and Executive Director at Tech4Dev, Oladiwura Oladepo, urged the beneficiaries to commit 100 per cent of their effort into the program.

Congratulations for making it into the fellowship but I must tell you that this is the time to put in work because without putting in the effort, success may not be guaranteed. It takes long hours, sometimes sleepless nights but I can assure you that success is just around the corner if you stay dedicated.

“Our goal is to train 5 million across Africa by 2030.”

In its maiden year, the Women Techsters Fellowship accepted 338 beneficiaries into the program from 4,800 applications received across 19 countries. This represents a 7% acceptance rate from 5 countries which include Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa.

The Women Techsters initiative is geared towards bridging digital and technology knowledge divide between men and women as well as ensuring equal access to opportunities for all.

The initiative has set a target of training 5 million women by 2030.

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