Melissa Slaymaker Country Director SA for Women-in-Tech

Women-in-Tech (WIT) is a global non-forprofit organisation established four and a half years ago by the CEO, Aoki. She is based in Paris and started it with this mission of empowering women and girls, and frustrated after decades of campaigning to get more women in technology, the gap wasn’t actually getting any smaller, the gender inequality gap was in fact increasing. It’s still increasing regardless of all the work that’s being done. And so it’s

this problem? Because a lot of things are being said in summits and events and there’s

great conversations going on, but nothing was being done to physically drive that change. Back in 2020, we launched the Africa chapter, virtually due to the pandemic. It was part of the 24-hour world tour and it offered a great opportunity to showcase that South Africa also has incredible women in technology and so does Africa. It also offered the platform to be part of this global movement, elevating women and showcasing their talents on a global stage. Two years later, we now have ten official volunteers that work for the Women-in-Tech South Africa chapter. Globally, we’ve got 245 ambassadors, all volunteers that work globally for the movement, and they are currently 25 chapters over six continents and we are almost about 190,000 members globally. So the women’s movement has grown considerably in the last four years into real movement where we have got women that actually actively drive change. All this educational programmes with various universities, we work with various corporate sponsors, we’ve got our own curriculum to educate women in technology. We also partner with companies to incorporate and learning more about blockchain technologies. We also have an Agile Academy, we have mentorship programs, workshops and events to help uplift people through education and to make tech learning accessible.

WIT has two other active African chapters. One is in Zambia and the other in Nigeria, and we’re hoping to open more chapters across Africa. We’re looking at Kenya as a hub where we can get some more tech talent from, with opening a WIT chapter in each country being our ultimate goal. In terms of Africa, it’s obviously not one big country, and we have so many different cultures and are so diverse, Africa is also geographically one of the largest continents. So the potential for talent is huge, if you look at age levels, Africa has the highest amount of youth being represented and about 52% of that youth is women. So if you want to upskill a continent, not excluding all men - we have many male allies - but if you focus on uplifting women, especially on the African continent, I mean, our future is going to be bright. We have to start with our youth and give them access to education, resources that they need so that they can be on the same level playing field as first world countries, and that we can then really uplift the whole ecosystem, the whole of the continent. Access to the Internet, date and electricity remain a challenge. We need to consider our programmes in the context

of rural areas not having any connection to WiFi or getting devices to poor areas.

An example of how the South Africa chapter has set out to address this is through our location at Philippi Village, Cape Town. We created an IT learning center for the children of the village to have a safe space where they can come, they can learn basic skills. They can learn how to create an email address, use word and Excel documents, and then teaching them eventually coding robotics, teaching them I.T. skills that they can then take with them in their

journey and not be left behind in this digital evolution. We also work with women and girls that are entering the world of work. And this is where my sort of recruitment experience comes into play. We teach them how to put a CV together, how to put your LinkedIn profile so that you can be found for jobs. We do mock interviews with them and teach them how do you present yourself in an interview, and we do a lot of confidence building on how to become your own when you see the value in your own unique self. We are doing our third cohort of the program, which is called the CME, which this year is sponsored by Sanlam and we work together with the University of the Western Cape on this journey over four months.

I always say, like every single industry, doesn’t matter if you’re in retail, health care, legal, whether you are in banking, you know, whatever, doesn’t matter. You’ve got technology that is the enabler in all of those industries.

So don’t be fooled. Technology’s everywhere. The other thing is also technology isn’t just jobs in coding. Technology is enabling our everyday jobs. So whether you’re in design and analysis, if you’re a manager, if you’re on the shop floor and working with electronic point of sale systems and you’re integrating data and your analyzing it, there’s so many jobs and ways of working in technology. It’s beginning to become more important for everyone to be educated and have access to technology, not just for people who plan to be a CTO or developers. I’ve come from a science background and I didn’t want to work in a lab. So I started doing recruitment just because I thought it would be to speak to people all day, which is what I love doing.

I started to fall in love with technology, the pace of the change and all the interesting things, so I learnt about technology and from finding talent and now upskilling myself and learning to code by myself. All this training is available online. I’m also learning about NFTs and how to get sorted with a NFT wallet. So you can see, there are so many opportunities in technology, whether it’s leadership, whether it’s business analysis or design, UI, UX design, web3 or it could be something that’s more data related or from a management perspective, anything - we’re all somewhere in our space. All women in tech.

You can go to our website and see how you can become a member, which will allow you to be added to our newsletters and be notified of any events happening in your region. And then if you want to be part of a chapter, you can also just write

us. There’s a submission page where you can get in touch with us or notify us if you’d like to open a chapter - if there isn’t a chapter in your country. You can become a sponsor; create educational content; work with us on our talent hub, which is getting your jobs on our talent hub job boards to showcase that your company is hiring talent and ideally talented women and diversity in your company. There are many ways to engage with Women-in-Tech. We also have events and one of our future events is on the 23rd of September. We are hosting the Women-in-Tech Africa Awards, which will be held in Cape Town, and we will be then highlighting some amazing talents in seven different categories, which includes; most inspiring team based startup; leadership award; lifetime achievement award; best ally award; most disruptive awards as well a high impact award. There’s lots of different ways that we can celebrate women, whether they work in an NGO, in universities, working for corporate, a startup, or even a team, we want to recognise all sort of levels of women across the kind of life journey and put a spotlight on great African talent. The winner of each category will then go to the global awards, which will be held in Lisbon on the 2nd of November.