Jeannette Kagame challenges men on gender attitude

Jeannette Kagame has been a champion of fighting gender inequality and also a leading promoter of family values and children rights.

The First Lady of Rwanda, Jeannette Kagame has called on global communities to change their attitude towards women, as a way of giving them a chance to contribute to innovative technology so as to bridge the digital divide today.

Mrs Kagame was addressing hundreds of participants at the ongoing Transform Africa Summit 2015, where she officially opened a session on ‘Digital Inclusion for Women’s empowerment’.

“If women have been innovative to come up with tech innovations, why are we still stuck in inequality, it’s because we don’t want to leave this practice?” she asked.

She highlighted stories of young Rwandan women who have contributed to the growth of the society through technological innovation such as M-Ahwii, Tohoza, HeHe Ltd; and have been internationally and regionally recognized for the initiative,

With these examples among many, the First Lady encouraged girls to be bold, stronger and better in order to claim their position in society.

World Wide Web Foundation research presented by Ingrid Brudvig, showed that the Gender gap in digital inclusion is still big.

For example Five percent of women are less likely to access internet according to research done by women’s rights online.

Areas of illiteracy, cost knowhow, lack of time and relevance as major barriers in gender and education goes high and cities with high gender gaps have also high internet gaps, eg Kampala, Maputo and Nairobi, unlike in Delhi where these researches were conducted.

Dorothy K. Gordon-Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center of Excellence in ICT, said that girls have to be given separate training in classroom setting so as to bring out their full potential.

Most of the research we did with girls showed that they feel minor in a science class full of boys and they try to pretend to be boy-like, but their potential is in skills and most of them preferred to have separate class when it comes to skills training” Gordon said.

But the Sudan Minister for ICT, Hon. Rebecca Joshua Okwaci, said that women still need to be competitive and stay in the realm of men at the early ages so that they can build a sense of the real world that they will be in.