Engineering isn’t for girls.
That, at least, was what they told Samah.
Five years ago, she graduated with a degree in electronic engineering, a subject she loved. But when she tried to get a job, she couldn’t. And she couldn’t because of her gender, because industrial electronics was deemed by potential employers to be ‘too harsh an environment’ for women.
Samah could have tried to find work abroad – although working as a woman in engineering offers challenges in many countries. (Just 16.5 per cent of engineers in the UK are women.) She decided to stay put, in her native Sudan, where she has the unstinting support of her family, and where she cites her favourite proverb: ‘Wherever God plants you, flourish’.
And she flourished. And quickly.
At the start of this year, Samah joined our programme to become one of our Coding for Kids trainers. The programme trains recent graduates, mostly young women, in equality and inclusion, entrepreneurship and computer coding. Through it we aim to give opportunities to women and girls and tackle gender inequalities in computer programming. Some participants use what they have learned to develop as teachers, and some use it to find a form of self-employment which is flexible and relatively well-paid and allows them to work from home. But Samah had another idea.
She would take what she learned and teach it to one hundred young women and girls, for free, through a non-profit organisation which she would start from scratch.
Samah calls her project 100 Girls – 100 Futures. The name was inspired by a larger-scale project sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences. But the inspiration for the project itself came from the coding workshop she attended at the British Council. She said, ‘I want to give young women and girls the chance to learn such knowledge [as I learned at the workshop], so they could benefit from it, and it could give them some opportunities in the future’. Her idea is to ‘give women the chance to start their careers in information technology, so they can help themselves and their families as well’.
As if transforming the lives of one hundred young women wasn’t difficult enough, she decided to give herself a deadline: to train all one hundred by the end of 2022. She has trained 37 so far.
Given the deadline, and given the tight schedule of most of the participants – and to ensure their safety – Samah is delivering the project online. Online delivery also allows her ‘to spread the knowledge all over the country and not limit it to those in the capital [Khartoum]’. She has been surprised by the widespread appeal of the initiative, with some participants coming from far-flung regions of the country – and some, such as those from Saudi Arabia, even joining from a neighbouring continent.
But geography is no barrier. Samah only asks that ‘whoever is going to attend the workshops has the desire to learn’.
And many have the desire to learn. Samah’s initiative has already inspired some of her students to start teaching their family members, and others in their communities, about coding from home; some have even started teaching projects of their own.
Although these kinds of projects are not linked directly to our work, they are an important and often unstated consequence of it.
We build connections, yes, but there is another, unseen side of what we do: we build people up to build connections of their own, with people who then build a hundred more – and so on, and so on – so that our work, at its best, has a ripple effect on whole cultures and countries and regions. Our claim to have an impact on peace and prosperity may be audacious, but, when we look at examples like Samah’s, and multiply those examples by untold thousands, over decades, in a hundred other countries, it is a claim which is substantial and justified.
The extent of Samah’s influence may be immeasurable. But it won’t end at coding.
Samah’s original goals were to give participants programming skills. But she aspires ‘to grow even bigger, to teach young women more about science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM)’, so that ‘in the future, when girls come to choose their majors and what they want to study, they won’t get turned down or stunned by the general stigma that engineering is only for boys’.
Indeed, as part of her efforts to prove that STEM is for everyone, next month she will launch her first coding workshop for deaf people.
And, so, she embodies the existential proverb: ‘wherever God plants you, flourish’.
Article by: Abdelhadi Elfaki, Project Coordinator/ Global Schools Programme. July 2022.
