International
Women's Day
DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality
The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality’. At SPARK, we work in many ways to close the digital divide for young people, including women and refugees, living in fragile and conflict-affected regions. Take a look at 6 ways we do this, around the world.
Digital finance for smallholder farmers in Rwanda
Access to new technologies and financial inclusion have transformed the lives of Rwandan women farmers. For subsistence and smallholder farmers, of whom approximately 70% in Rwanda are women, access to business loans and growth opportunities are severely limited. The Digital Access to Finance (DA2F) programme, in collaboration with Equity Bank, MoneyPhone, Access to Finance Rwanda and the Rwandan Irish Potato farming cooperatives, provides farmers with digital loans, lower interest rates and adjusted collateral requirements. Hilarie Kanyange and Beatrice Musabyimana have both benefited from the programme, improving their businesses and increasing their production by up to 40%. This demonstrates how innovative solutions can address structural inequalities and promote gender equality in agriculture.
Coding skills lead to remote jobs
According to a report by the International Finance Corporation, only 23% of the digital workforce in Lebanon is made up of women. A lack of digital literacy, legal frameworks, and perception of freelancing all contribute to this. However, programmes such as the Skills Training Education Programme (STEP) are helping women like Souraya Abdel Kader and Asmaa Hamid gain the skills and experience needed to enter the tech industry. Through a Full Stack Developer boot camp with SPARK’s partner, SE Factory, 37 students graduated from two boot camps. Through digital skills programmes like this, young women have the opportunity to learn sought-after tech skills but also receive career coaching and core job skills. They network with professionals and showcase their abilities to potential employers. Now, Asmaa is interning remotely for a company in the UAE.
E-commerce platforms open new markets for women-led SMEs
Celine and Hanady, two Jordanian women entrepreneurs, were struggling to expand their home-based ceramic and design businesses beyond Instagram, which limited their reach to a wider customer base. After joining Souq Fann, an e-commerce platform that connects artists, artisans, and handicraft producers throughout Jordan to new markets, they gained the necessary tools to market their products, showcase their stories, and offer easy payment, delivery and customer support services. Using the platform, they were able to sell their unique products internationally and expand their online sales, eliminating the need for physical stores and reducing overhead costs. Initiatives like this one, part of SPARK’s Economic Resilience programme financed by the Qatar Fund for Development, help to scale women-led businesses and close the digital gender divide.
“Founder, not ‘female’ founder”: Supporting tech startups
Raya Fatayer, a 30-year-old Palestinian, is the co-founder and CEO of The Middle Frame, an Arab stock image platform that uses AI to provide content creation solutions for businesses with their diverse library of images from the Middle East and North Africa. The lack of authentic and diverse representation of the region in stock images led Raya to start her business, which challenges stereotypes and promotes a more nuanced understanding of her region. With startup support from SPARK and its partner in Palestine, Flow Accelerator, Raya is determined to expand The Middle Frame to the Gulf as well and use her platform to break down the barriers that have traditionally hindered female founders.
Matching remote interns in Iraq to international companies
SPARK’s award-winning Remote Internship programme trains and matches talented refugee, IDP and job seekers in Iraq to 3-6 month internships within national and international companies. The internships are particularly designed to ensure more female job seekers become more competitive candidates for the future digital job market. On completing their internships, around 50% of interns are offered further employment contracts, on average. Rama Labbad, one young woman from KR-I, lost her job during the pandemic and despite her outstanding language and IT skills, could not find employment. She was matched to a remote position at Fanack, an independent media organisation focused on the Middle East and North Africa based in The Netherlands. “Apart from the learning aspect, I truly enjoy being part of an international team with people from Europe and Africa,” says Rama.
Innovative gender-sensitive curriculum, policies and technologies within higher education
SPARK works in many countries with universities and higher vocational education institutions to digitalise their services for students, especially women, to enable them to better access blended learning tools, digital skills needed for the workplace and gender-sensitive curriculum. In Iraq, for example, we’re supporting gender units of our partner universities to develop their policies to advance gender equality and women’s advancement. In Burundi, we’re working with the Université du Lac Tanganyika to pilot a new, digital platform to train and coach up to 500 graduates in core employability skills and link them to internships.