This archive report was first published on 4 May 2021.
Supporting the Women Who Fuel Africa's Future ¶
As of 2021, women make up less than 30% of the world's researchers, and the numbers are even lower for minority women. To increase the number of women in leadership in STEM and tech-related fields, it is essential to increase the pipeline of women and minorities entering STEM fields, pursuing advanced degrees, and eventually pursuing careers in it.
Phila Phungula, a Developer Advocate at IBM in South Africa, is aware of the disparity in the number of women in STEM fields. She represents one of the 30% of professionals in the technology industry in sub-Saharan Africa and is working to expose students to IBM technologies, giving them insights into emerging technologies such as blockchain and Microservices.
IBM's study shows that only 1 in 4 global organizations have made gender equity a business priority, and there are now fewer women in the pipeline to fill senior executive roles than there were in 2019. To address this issue, IBM is working with researchers and organizations to create programs that help women overcome STEM career barriers.
One such program is led by Charity Wayua in Kenya, who is taking in computer science interns interested in research and giving them firsthand experience in publication writing, mentorship, and daily interactions with researchers. The objective is to make them strong candidates for a competitive and changing environment.
Women in Africa are leveraging new technologies to solve the continent's unsolvable problems. For example, Amira Abbas, a Research scientist at the IBM Research Lab in Johannesburg, is working on quantum technologies that are driving diversity and collaboration. She comments that the quantum community is still very young and diverse with a good number of female colleagues.
Aisha Walcott-Bryant, a member of the Africa Lab based in Nairobi, recently worked on a project introducing the Worldwide Non-pharmaceutical Interventions Tracker for COVID-19 (WNTRAC) — a comprehensive dataset consisting of more than 6,000 NPIs across 261 countries and territories, now publicly available for free, for non-commercial use and frequently updated to ensure the most up-to-date information.
