Equity in ICT

There has been a large gap in the number of females in ICT in Kenya over the years. Measures have been put in place to ensure girls are given the opportunity to get into this career that is male dominated, mostly due to the perception that it is too hard for girls, but is ICT workforce balanced or is the situation still as it was?

After years of efforts to bring equity in the ICT workforce, the Industry still seems to be male dominated. This is informed by a National Information Communication report of 2018, on a survey done to establish the gender proportions of the ICT workforce. Overall, the male employees accounted for 75% of total employees across all MDA’s, compared to female employees who accounted for 25% as at June 30th 2017.

Girls are stepping up and breaking into the male-dominated ICT world. Trainings are held, and scholarships given to young enthusiastic girls to enable them appreciate technology as a viable career path and not a ‘boys only club’. Some of the organizations pioneering this are:

AkiraChix which is one of the successful organizations, has played a big role in transforming the ICT world to accommodate girls. They offer more structured ICT training with full scholarships in addition to teaching their students entrepreneurship skills and mentoring them as they venture into small start-ups. Their programmes are expanding to reach under-privileged girls and young women in primary and secondary schools and at universities, including technology workers and those who wish to pursue careers in technology, making it effectively a full-service programme.

The African Centre for Women Information and Communications Technology (ACWICT) is also a Kenya-based ICT for Development Organization whose mission is to promote women and youth access to knowledge of ICTs.

Olive Mayoli, a graduate of ACWCIT, has a deep passion for IT but things have so far not worked out well for her, she has therefore resulted to doing online writing as she keeps on applying for the IT jobs. She explains that although she did procurement in college, right after graduating she opened a cyber, this is because of the interest she has always had in IT. She begun this small business with three computers, a printer and internet, just the basics, but most importantly with the knowledge she had acquired from a three month course right after high school in computer packages. Most of the things she says she learnt on the job.

The cyber business did not go as well as planned, so she moved to working as a customer care agent, that mostly deals with internet, hence most of her work was IT related, where she had to learn trouble shooting and other IT essentials. This expounded her knowledge and experience in IT.

Olive worked for a number of years but she had the desire to grow more in that area so she resulted to enrolling for an IT infrastructure course from ACWCIT where she graduated and has since been looking for an opportunity to put her skills into use in an IT related job.

Maureen who works as an IT personnel under clients relations, speaks of her frustration from some male clients who have a bias against receiving services from ladies because they prefer men, who they believe are more suited and knowledgeable for the position.

Ignatius Ouma, an IT trainer at ACWCIT says that many organizations and even the government are coming up to pioneer for more ladies to have awareness in ICT and embrace it. As for employment, him together with Maureen advise that each company adopts the one third gender rule in it’s employment especially in the IT departments, to ensure ladies are absorbed into the IT workforce.