The BarCamp was as a result of strong and pregnant reviews, criticisms, and largely interactions that followed the screening of the first ever Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) movie #GirlRising at Makerere University on Monday April 19, 2015. This conversation was started @AfricaResilient twitter page and ladies who were part of the conversation managed to follow it up and actively participate the Bar Camp. It was observed that the attendance and participation was largely dominated by the gentlemen as opposed to the ladies. This sparked some concerns and later a discussion that “ladies seem to be sorted out, are afraid, less motivated or shy away from leadership” among others.
The drive aimed at interesting more ladies in ICT in Uganda dates from as way back as 2000 with organizations such as Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET 2000), Africa Women in Technology (Afchix 2004), Women in Technology Uganda (WITU 2011), Girl Geek (2012) among others championing the lead. Over time, objectives and purpose(s) for these organizations have generally been to promote and support the uptake of ICTs by girls/women in Uganda so that they can competitively innovate and take up the ever sprouting opportunities while harnessing the merits of collaboration, networking, mentorship, coaching, peer-to-peer learning, gender balance and project funding. The successes of these projects have been impressively growing until the curve reached its plateau. As an observation by many, a number of factors/challenges have slowly eroded their way into these organizations/groups affecting their activities, members as well as their outputs; among these, the most common are;
- Leadership – bottom – up involvement of the members in creation of objectives, work-plans, team growth and transition.
- Membership inconsistences – in participation, real-life use of the knowledge learnt as well passing it on to their peers.
- Few and loosely tied synergies amongst the various ‘girl’ groups
It is from the observations above that ResilientAfrica Network (RAN) hosted a #BarCamp panel discussion to share a light moment with representatives from various girl groups not only to understand but also identify how they can work together with these initiatives to tackle emerging challenges and scale impact.
It was held at the Makerere University School of Public Health RAN Innovation Lab on Plot 30, Upper Kololo Terrace.
