Championing Initiatives that Promote The Role of Women in Business

As we join the United Nations in celebrating women in STEM this March, we are proud of how our different institutions across the continent are championing initiatives that promote the role of women in business, particularly in STEM fields.

UPSAT Partners with Connect’Innov

Through a pre-incubation program and in partnership with Connect’Innov, UPSAT in Tunisia are able to help students and alumni to realise their dreams and launch their startups in the HealthTech space. Recent successful projects that have been led by females include:

  • Trust: A health tech solution that allows parents to track the vital signs of babies or children, including temperature, breathing frequency, and sleep position via a small patch. This is connected to a mobile application that alerts parents in real-time, should there be any problems.
  • Kids Protect: A mobile app that helps preserve the visual and mental health of a child by allowing parents to control the use of their children’s phones and tablets through the following features:
    • Screen blocking if the recommended distance is exceeded (33 cm)
    • Provision of learning games and supervised videos
    • A protective filter for the eyes
    • A control system for parents to limit the hours of screen use
    • Resting exercises for the eyes
    • Vision tests
  • Vision Hope: A sensor box that is attached to a necklace and coupled with wireless headphones, a camera, GPS and various sensors to help blind and visually impaired people and make them more independent.

Université Mundiapolis de Casablanca Welcomes the Henry Ford Entrepreneurship Academy

Morocco’s Université Mundiapolis de Casablanca has been proud to host the Henry Ford Entrepreneurship Academy’s (HFEA) immersive ‘Entrepreneur’s Journey’ workshop. In a male-dominated field, female entrepreneurs pursuing start-ups in STEM benefit from programs that expand their access to education and deepen their connection with the communities they serve. This program encourages all entrepreneurs to pursue their passion and tap into their creativity by exploring their human story, mindset, and set of activities essential for growth. HFEA has been supporting female-run start-ups since 2017, teaching entrepreneurial acumen across industries. To date, we have supported over 600 women across eight countries.

Le Wagon Casablanca Partners with Orange Morocco to Train Women Data Scientists

To reshape the future of XR technology and remove gender bias, over the next two years Le Wagon Casablanca will support the Hello Women by Orange Morocco program to train women in Data Science, through acculturation events and boot camp style training.

At its inauguration event in January 2023, the partnership announced:

  • 48 women to be trained in Data Science, including 24 scholarships financed entirely by Orange for external candidates
  • 24 free monthly events for the community
  • A roundtable focused on understanding and reducing gender bias in Data Sciences and AI

Worldwide, only 20% of data scientists are women. It is widely understood that the lack of women working on algorithms behind AI, particularly generative AI, poses a systemic risk of gender bias throughout these global technological advances.

It is predicted that data science will see more growth than almost any other field by 2029, and Le Wagon Casablanca is committed to the feminization of innovation professions.

MANCOSA’s Centre For Women In Leadership

South African institution MANCOSA’s Centre For Women In Leadership (CWIL) has been committed to advocating for women to be given the opportunity to explore meaningful work and professional opportunities since its inception in August 2015.

Through a number of research, advocacy, training, networking and mentorship activities, as well as involvement in several charitable causes and skills development programmes, the CWIL aims to promote the positive need for more women in leadership roles.

EMSI Morocco Hosts Google Women Techmakers

Morocco’s Ecole Marocaine des Sciences de l’Ingénieur (EMSI) hosted the 6th edition of the Women Techmakers’ annual International Women’s Day (IWD) event under the theme #DareToBe in March 2023. Organised in collaboration with Google Developers Casablanca, Google Women Techmakers, and EMSI’s own Women in Engineering Sciences (WiES), the event was an inspirational meeting between several experts in the fields of IT, who met to discuss mobile development and the most requested sort skills for a career in IT.

Founded by Dr Khadija Bousmar, a lecturer and researcher at EMSI, WiES aims to promote the role of women engineers/researchers/entrepreneurs at the heart of the development of engineering sciences in innovation, research, social life, and entrepreneurship. The mission of WiES is to provide the necessary and relevant support to women and girls in their endeavours in the engineering field.

Google Women Techmakers has been created to provide visibility, community, and resources for women in technology.

Honoris is Proud to be WIA’s Official Knowledge Partner

Since our inception in 2017, we have been honoured to partner with the Women In Africa (WIA) initiative – the world’s leading international platform for the economic development and the support of African women entrepreneurs. Through this partnership, we have supported no less than 816 exceptional young women entrepreneurs, driven by their goals and dreams to transform the African continent, by offering programmes that enable them to develop their entrepreneurial, behavioural, and digital skills in line with the current trends of our evolving world.