• Contact us
  • Connecting and empowering women in technology in the Middle East & Africa

Contact

Contact us

Inspired yet? Great! Shoot a mail to gwit4emerging@gmail.com and become a part of the GWIT Family.

Super Inspired? Have a pressing need to share stuff with everyone right away? Hop onto the GWIT Forum. Happy Posting!

GWIT extends its boundaries to the offline world with regular Events hosted in and around the Middle East and Africa region, for women to come forth and experience the technological advances and opportunities available to women across the globe.

Opportunities

Opportunities


Google Women in Technology Ambassadors (GWITA)


Opportunities Professional

Opportunities for professionals: Online Advertising





Google Products

Establish your company online quickly and easily with Google Site

Share the right things with the right customers with Google+

Promote your activity using videos on YouTube

Google AdSense is a fast and easy way to monetize your content by displaying relevant and engaging ads on your website pages: download our AdSense Overview here

Google AdWords is an online advertising program that allows anyone to advertise on Google.com and its network of partner websites. Learn more: download our "Getting Started with Google AdWords" guide

Opportunities Student

Opportunities for students


At Google, we believe students are the future! We are always looking for ways to help further educate students and to interact with bright, young minds. Below you'll find some excellent resources to help you interact with Google.







Anita Borg Scholarship - Africa, Europe, Middle East Deadline for 2012: February 1st.
Google Anita Borg Scholarship recipients will each receive a financial award for the academic year. A group of female undergraduate and graduate students will be chosen from the applicant pool, and scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of each candidate’s academic background and demonstrated leadership. In addition, all scholarship recipients and finalists will be invited to attend a retreat at Google.

Check out the profiles of the girls awarded with the Anita Borg Scholarship
Check out the Scholarship Opportunities Page




Job opportunities for students - visit the site
Search our opportunities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.




Conference & Travel Grants - visit the site
Google supports a variety of external engineering and computer science-related initiatives associated with universities, including summer schools, workshops and programming contests.




Student Ambassador Program - visit the site
The Deadline for students in Sub-Saharan Africa in March 1st, 2012 - click here to apply
The Google Student Ambassador Program is an opportunity for students to act as liaisons between Google and their universities.




Google Online Marketing Challenge - visit the site
Professors register for the Challenge from November 15, 2011 to May 1, 2012; Students can register from January 31, 2012 to May 11, 2012.
The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a global online marketing student competition open to any higher education institution from anywhere in the world.




CodeJam - Google annual programming competition - visit the site
Registration opens on Tuesday, March 13th, 2012.
Google Code Jam is an annual programming competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time.




Google Summer of Code - visit the site
Program announced on February 4th, 2012.
Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects.

Resources

Google Maps


Inspiration:

Google Maps and the New York Times


Read more...

Friday, October 12, 2012

Aashika Damodar - Day 6

Starting small and growing beyond tech

Caption: Program Planning for Enslavement Prevention Alliance-West Africa (EPAWA)

It’s 6:30 AM and I am getting ready to do a stakeholder interview with members of iHub in Nairobi who are evaluating an Internews-funded project in Accra called SMS Kita Hudi Yee, a text-message based community monitoring program on various forms of forced labor and human trafficking conditions in Ghana. This 3-month pilot project started back in September 2011, in partnership with the Enslavement Prevention Alliance in West Africa. I was excited about this program for various reasons. For one, it took place in Ghana, one of my favorite countries in West Africa, and two, this was a new model of programming and usage of mobile tech, which Survivors Connect was interested in trying.

This was a unique opportunity for us to experiment with new ideas, as well as have the backing of iHub researchers to help us evaluate what did and didn’t work, and ways we can improve in the future so that other organizations can try similar methods. This program involved trained community monitors who were equipped with mobile phones and tool kits on how to identify potential trafficking, and alert EPAWA headquarters of evidence via SMS/MMS or calls, of which EPAWA would map, investigate and respond. I was in Ghana for two weeks to train EPAWA on how to use various open source technology tools and do programmatic design. Now that we’re past the 3-month pilot, it was time for iHub to interview all stakeholders of the program to evaluate the project. Here are some of the thoughts I shared and lessons I’ve learned, which I shared with Leonida Mutuku, Marian Tadefa-Kubabom and others:

Start Small: I know it’s easy to think of technology as being the grandiose solution to our development problems (and “first” world problems too!). Given that the ICT4D space is very young, I can’t stress enough how important it is to start small. Starting small means you can be flexible, agile and evaluate strategies easily and efficiently. This is one of the reasons we love using Frontline SMS as a starting platform to test our ideas. Makers of Frontline SMS, much like us, believe in “horizontal scaling,” which is essentially the idea of hundreds of systems serving smaller groups of people in designated communities, as opposed to large centralized/national solutions that serve millions. When it comes to topics as sensitive as gender-based violence, it is really important to us that solutions are localized to small communities, managed and maintained by that community and there is local ownership.

Technology isn’t everything: Surprise surprise! I think in reality, everyone knows this, but somehow I find over and over again that people forget this. Technology is a beautiful thing, which has incredible capacity to enhance various aspects of our lives. But technologies such as mobile or social media are first and foremost tools. Through our various partnership programs, I’ve found the most successful projects are those where there is a committed team of individuals engaged and actively managing the project. Delegation, skill and teamwork is needed for literally anything to succeed. What we do with technology today and the diverse variety of applications all come from the context in which they are used, NOT the technical capacity itself.

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