Girls in ICT Day Zambia 2015

The 2015 Girls in ICt Day event in Zambia was meant to be a showcase for Zambia that could be repeated in the coming years. The event was organized by ZAMREN, the Zambian National Research and Education Network organisation. The venue of the event was at Mulungushi University near Kabwe. Not only girls from schools around Kabwe were to be invited, but also from the Copperbelt region (300 km to the North). The event was financed by the Dutch government through the NICHE project ZAMREN.

As the concept of a  "Girls In ICT Day" is not really known in Zambia it was decided to prelude the 2015 event with a series of pre-events at schools that would participate in the event. These pre-events were meant to sensitize the girls, and their teachers, to the concept of promoting ICT as an interesting career choice for women. In total more than 20 schools were involved in these pre-events and more than 1800 girls were exposed  to the idea of ICT as interesting career opportunity.

On the Girls in ICT Day event itself (on April 23) in total nearly 250 came to Mulungushi University for a thrilling program where the girls presented ICT cases to each other and in various forms: demo's of the use of ICT, hardware maintenance and sketche's dealing with enhancement of ICT as a career for young women.

The organizers of the event  are confident that some of the girls that attended the event will certainly "go into ICT", but more important the Kabwe event  is an example for future events that will get even more female prticipation in ICT.