Ghana's Girls-in-ICT AI, Machine Learning and Big Data Bootcamp at the Kofi Annan Centre

In September 2021 Ghana's Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation, GIFEC and the Kofi Annan ICT Centre of Excellence (with Huawei Technologies Ghana as tertiary partner) ran a 10-day residential programme training 50 female university students in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data and Cybersecurity, as the tertiary strand of Ghana's national Girls-in-ICT initiative.
The wider programme reached far more girls at lower levels with adjacent digital-skills curricula: roughly 2,000 girls in the North East and Western North regions and 60,000 female senior-high students across Ashanti, Central and Eastern regions in 2021 (cybersecurity-focused), rising to 500 upper-primary and junior-high girls trained in the Greater Accra Region in June 2024 by MoCD with GI-KACE and GIFEC. Organisers reported that over 60% of trained girls had no prior experience with computers.
The programme has continued expanding regionally each year (5,000 girls planned for the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo, Savannah and Northern regions), but published evidence remains largely participation counts and baseline digital-literacy figures rather than a formal pre/post skills or employment outcomes evaluation.

Read the full analysis: https://www.graphic.com.gh/features/opinion/girls-in-ict-journey-so-far.html