The faculty of Informatics at Hawassa University organized a co-creation workshop for female students.
The gender divide in the ICT and Digital Technologies sector is a global phenomenon. In South Africa, approximately 28% of the tech workforce are women. In Canada, reports indicate that 26.7% of ICT employees are female. Australia is similar, with one source indicating 28% of their sector is female. This global situation correlates directly with the under-representation of girls in ICT education. Information from the Berkeley School of Information shows that the percentage of computer and information science bachelor’s degree recipients during the years 2000 to 2019 is within the range of 18 – 28%.
Even though there is lack of supportive study, the case in Ethiopia could not be different. The university-level statistics on the dismissal rates of female students have shown the existence of a gender gap in academic attrition at the Faculty of Informatics, Hawassa University. As an example, 21% of the 77 second-year female students of the Faculty enrolled for the first semester of the 2018/19 academic year were dismissed academically whereas the male students’ dismissal rate during the same semester was 18% (N=209). The dismissal percentage of 2019/20 amongst the first-year female students of the Faculty was 22% (N=66). But, the male students’ dismissal was much lower at 8% (N=186).
The one-day co-creation workshop organized at the Faculty of Informatics on December 03, 2022, aimed to encourage the creation of a social system to boost students’ engagement during their higher education experience. The theme of the co-creation workshop was “Learn from the experience of Successful Female ICT Professionals from Industries and Academia.” The interest of the co-creation workshop is to see student engagement in co-curricular programming to increase retention and success rates. The Undergraduate Dropout Process Model (Spady, 1970, 1971) was the co-creation workshop’s theoretical foundation. The theory assumes that students operate with two main institutional systems: the academic system and the social system. The social system focuses on attitudes, interests, and personality dispositions.
There were three speakers in the workshop consisting of one industry practitioner and two young faculty members who are on study leave abroad to speak for 35 female student participants. A successful industry practitioner, Ms. Hawi Tesfaye, who is a software engineer by profession and Software Solutions Manager at IE Network Solutions, shared her industry experience on her student life at high school, Addis Ababa University, and her three years of work at IE Networks Solutions. Her talk and Q&A covered building the best learning habits in class and out of class using the Internet as a platform, and the need to build skills through active participation in course projects and building a portfolio of their project-related activities (e.g. using GitHub) and taking different additional pieces of training and certifications given online for free or at a reduced student fare.
Ms. Meti Tesfaye, a student of Software Engineering at ELTE, Hungary, and Ms. Azeb Taye, a NURTURE exchange student at USN, Norway made their speech online about their life as undergraduate students at Hawassa University. Ms. Meti focused on the value of spending time in computer laboratories and participating in project activities (such as Capstone) to build practical skills and to have industry skills. Ms. Azeb capitalized on the importance of creating a clear understanding of the learning objectives or goals of courses and course units and reading course resources including reference materials. She told that she checked back to the course/course unit objectives of courses at the end of her study to evaluate whether she managed to cover them all. Both guests from the academic intuitions advised students to manage their time properly and minimize the culture of intensive reading only during exam seasons.
The co-creation workshop has also invited guests from the Institute of Technology and Gender offices of Hawassa University and the Institute. The workshop was completed by selecting 12 female students from the four undergraduate study programs of the Faculty of Informatics for an industry visit scheduled for December 9 – 11, 2022 in Addis Ababa. Sanitary pads were also distributed to the female students and a certificate was awarded to the industry presenter, IE Computer Network Solutions, and the workshop organizers. The Workshop was broadcasted as news by the Radio Program of the South Radio and Television Agency.
The co-creation workshop was organized by the NURTURE Project as part of its Gender Mainstreaming Initiatives.
You can read more on below links: