The United Kingdom’s Foreign Development and Commonwealth Office (FCDO) and Cybersafe Foundation, a non-governmental organisation, have graduated 2,400 Nigerians at the Digi-Girls programme designed to empower women and girls for the digital economy.
Speaking at the Digi-Girls graduation and stakeholders’ workshop on closing the digital gender divide in Nigeria, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Catriona Laing, said the UK supports Nigeria in its bold ambition to create 100 million jobs in 10 years and believes that the digital economy can play a major part in unlocking this.
Laing stressed that improving girls’ access to education is a key part of the UK’s G7 Presidency and is at the heart of global efforts to build back better from the pandemic and that is why her country is pleased to be here today at the graduation of the first cohort of 2,400 women and girls who benefited from the Digi-Girls project.
She said as announced last month by the UK’s Minister for Africa, during her visit to Nigeria, “we can expand this project to directly benefit an additional 4,000 women, and reach a further 10,000 women through the train-the-trainer approach.
“We believe that programmes will help in addressing the digital inequality in Nigeria that currently holds a 15 per cent gender gap against women, with much at stake we are tireless in our determination to continue to promote women and girls’ rights and help unleash the potential they have, wherever they live,” she said.
The executive director, founder Cybersafe foundation, Confidence Staveley said the differentiating factor of a programme like this when women come through the programme, they are no longer women who needs to be shown a favour but are women who have skills and value to give the world and that is what a programme of such nature can do, it gives women the skills that make them competitive at the local and global stage.
Staveley said Covid-19 has thought the world a lot and technology is booming in Nigeria, “we do not want half of the population of people cut off from the wealth created by technology and that is what we have done through this programme. We know it is very challenging to be a woman and still trying to gain new skills in this time,
“So, we have introduced gamification so that you get some reward for learning. We have also put into consideration not to leave women who are living with disability outside the training,. We have added a lot of new things that will aid their learning and we have also increased the number of intakes to 4,000, to accommodate more people,” Staveley added
