By Prince Osuagwu

For Intel Nigeria, in spite of its reality, the continued lamentation that women and girls in Nigeria are disadvantaged when compared to men’s participation in ICT, is beginning to sound like broken record.

It believes that since it has been identified as a problem, a solution is required. And therefore every available measure must be explored. However, its own idea is that there must be continued digital training where these set of people must benefit from the potentials of technology.

The company’s Corporate Affairs Manager, Mr Osagie Ogunbor in an exclusive chat with Vanguard recently, said that the African woman is loaded with activities and so needed to be presented with ICT in a manner that she can gladly add it into her daily routine. Osagie also spoke on many other issues including why his company believes that women can make a difference if they can embrace the ICT platform

The divide
”If you look at the whole spectrum of education, you know that, in most countries, women and girls are disadvantaged. So, we then try to see what we can do to use technology to empower individuals, especially the women. Because of our in-depth knowledge in technology, we know that ICT can be used to empower the women”

The problem, the solution
However, we also observed that most of these women are not digitally literate, which is the ‘in-thing’ in the 21st Century. So we weighed up other options and came up with partnering the African Women Entrepreneurship Programme, AWEP.

AWEP is an initiative of United Nations, an umbrella body of women who are active in Small and Medium Enterprises business segment. The organisation brings them together for better collaboration and efficiency.

We partner with AWEP Nigeria; we partner with AWEP Ghana in collaboration with the United Nations Women Department. At the end of the day, we do what we call ‘Training the Trainers”. This involves training strongest hands of AWEP who we are sure will be able to train other women. Since we started this, we have trained over 300 women in digital literacy in Nigeria alone but we are looking at over 2, 000 of them to be trained before the end of this year, who will then go ahead to train the other women”.

Digital training, not added load
For Ogunbor, no matter the tight schedule of women who battle with house chores and other sundry activities, digital training is not an additional load but a relief. “We are absolutely not adding to the responsibilities of women but we are providing them with digital literacy things easier for them. Let me use a female fashion designer for example. We are saying that instead of just depending on people in your neighbourhood who know you as a fashion designer and those who will only give you job by getting to know where your shop is physically located; you can exponentially increase your market by just simply having the skill to build a website.

Basically, as Intel, we are saying that technology brings convenience, efficiency and effectiveness and we want Nigerian women to leverage it. Technology makes your business more profitable. So, training women in digital literacy is not taking them out of line, it is simply by telling them to stay in their business and take full advantage of the potential that they have through using technology.

Impacts of digital training
Today, more women are getting interested in the programme and that is big evidence that the training is adding value to their businesses.

So, I think this has demystified the erroneous belief that women do not crave for technological know how. A lot of women are actually interested in ICT. We have seen a lot of women entrepreneurs who are nursing mothers or full house wives so it is a lot of sacrifice and effort to be able to do all of this and embrace digital literacy. Therefore, instead of sitting down, lamenting gender divide, time has come for every hand to be on deck. Everybody must throw in an idea to help, no matter how little.