…. Visits Westly Girls Senior Secondary School with charge for more female inclusion in ICT.
The Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria, APWEN, Lagos State Chapter, has commemorated the year 2024 International Day of Girls in ICT, with a charge for more female inclusion in the engineering profession and technology at large.
Chairperson, APWEN Lagos, Engineer Atinuke Wuraola Owolabi gave the charge, while addressing students of the Wesley Girls Senior Secondary School, Sabo yaba at an event organised by the Association to mark the day with the theme: “Digital Skills For Life”.
Engineer Owolabi, who said the issues bedeviling women’s development can only be solved by women themselves,noted that engineering is now broad and beyond the use of hands-on tools to solve problems.
She explained that the different aspects of engineering such as Electrical, Mechanical, Aeronautical and Agricultural Engineering among others, which girls can delve into and build a career around.
Still on the evolution of technology and its impacts on engineering, the AWPEN Chairperson said it is advantageous for girls to move with the wave of things by looking beyond the aforementioned subjects and tilt their creativity and innovations into the aspects of medicine in the area of biomedical engineering, Software Engineering, Data Science, Python and Cloud Computing.
Engineer Owolabi noted that the Association is training girls on how to write codes, data science, among other technology courses for early empowerment, as this will provide avenues for the girl child to impact their communities and nations.
On her part, president of Wesley Old Girls Association WOGA, Engineer Olusola Agboola, made it known that the Association invited the APWEN team to speak to the girls and encourage them to be creativeand innovative in order to spur their contributions to the growth and economy of their communities and the country at large.
In the highlight of the event, the APWEN team exhibited engineering work,conducted real life experiments with the students, while books on Data Science and Python learning were gifted to outstanding students after the innovation exhibition.
In 2024, International Girls in ICT Day was celebrated on 25th of April. This year’s theme for the Girls in ICT day celebrations is “Leadership“, to underscore the critical need for strong female role models in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers.
This is because although women now fill 40 percent of high-skill occupations globally, their participation in ICT-related fields continues to be low.