Pacific Girls in ICT Day — Samoa's National AI Literacy, Cybersecurity and STEM Outreach Programme, Apia

Girls in ICT Day is an annual ITU-backed regional programme, run jointly with national telecom regulators across the Pacific since around 2015, aimed at closing the gender gap in STEM and ICT careers.
Samoa's national implementation is run by the Office of the Regulator and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology with ITU's Asia-Pacific office. The 2024 event brought together 54 girls and 9 boys; the 2025 tenth-anniversary edition expanded to 16 schools across Savai'i and Upolu. The 2025 curriculum explicitly covered cybersecurity, cyberbullying and, per a participating teacher, 'the pros and cons of using Artificial Intelligence', with a regulator official publicly cautioning that 'we have to be very careful in addressing the challenges that come with using this [AI] tool'.
Because more girls have been passing STEM exams in Samoa, the programme is being renamed and expanded toward a 'Youth in ICT' format that also includes boys — a change reported transparently by organisers rather than obscured.
Caveats: attendance and outcome figures come from the convening bodies (ITU, the national regulator) rather than an independent auditor, and the programme is a light-touch annual awareness day rather than an intensive multi-week bootcamp, so its dosage and depth of skills-building are limited compared with residential coding camps.

Read the full analysis: https://www.samoaobserver.ws/category/samoa/114149