By Aida Daguda | Directress
The Centre for Civil Society Promotion (CCSP) continued with the activities of promoting the Information and Communication Technologies among girls in Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of the COVID-19 crisis.
Since most of the educational activities across the country are organized online, CCSP has decided to organize this year’s Hour of Code in the same way. CCSP organized consecutive events from December 7 to December 11, 2020. Five workshops and motivational events gathered 150 elementary and high school students from all around Bosnia and Herzegovina, with more than 50% girls. The speakers in these events, Almedin Beganovic, Ibrahim Muzaferija, Rastko Zeljkovic, Suad Torlak, and Amina Muzurovic, covered a variety of topics, such as the path to success in ICT, Mobile Development, Artificial Intelligence, and Microsoft’s Minecraft Education Edition. To promote gender equality in this sector, CCSP decided to dedicate a whole session to women in ICT, the challenges and obstacles women face, how to overcome them, and what are the benefits of being a female in ICT.
On April 30 2021 CCSP organized a virtual motivational workshop for 20 girls on the occasion of the International Day of Girls in Information and Communication Technologies. As the event took place online girls from rural areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina also got the chance to take part in this event. The speakers included Zinka Bejtic, a Digital Media professor at the American University in Sharjah (UAE), with more than 20 years of teaching and professional experience, and Amina Muzurovic, Mobile and Salesforce Developer at Mistral Company. Zinka shared her story which also included confronting gender stereotypes during her teaching experience but stressed the importance of establishing close ties with students and respecting everyone's identity and life path for the transferred knowledge and experience to make sense. "Get out of your comfort zone to see what you can do if you want to," said Zinka, adding that women's empowerment starts by supporting each other, influencing the younger generations, appearing as role models, so that young women can have when to see. " Amina offered an IT perspective and shared the story of her path in the sector. One of the participants in the workshop was Nejra Coric, who insisted on sharing her story. Namely, after last year's Girls in ICT event organized by CCSP, Nejra remained in contact with Amina, who inspired her in her IT career. Although she doubted her ability to complete a task for an IT competition, as she says, "I recalled Amina's advice and completed the task, and won one of the prizes."
We hope that the girls who had the opportunity to listen to this motivational workshop gained additional self-confidence and strength and that together we took another step towards breaking stereotypes and increasing the number of women in the IT sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Other than these events, CCSP has promoted the project itself on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, as well as urged the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to support this particular project and other projects alike. However, the main success of these events is proactive girls taking up courses and careers in ICT after being motivated by our projects.
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