According to a press release issued by the Commission, a national workshop will be held in Tunis from September 4-7 on the topic of “Digital upskilling of women and girls in Tunisia.” This workshop is being organized by the gender equality and women empowerment section of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in partnership with the Ministry of Women, Family, Childhood and Seniors and the Ministry of Communication Technologies.
The objective is to build a critical mass of women and girls with relevant skills for future jobs while also preparing them to leverage the information economy and increasing digital demand. This will be accomplished by training trainers in digitalization, which will also increase the capacity of the country to run its training programs.
According to the official website of the ECA, the workshop will focus on a variety of topics such as cybersecurity, digital marketing, online outreach, connecting women to regional and global markets and information streams, digital content creation, how to harness the information economy, as well as utilizing emerging tools such as artificial intelligence and workflow automation.
E-commerce, digital banking, space science, and remote sensing will be the primary areas of emphasis during a later phase of the project that is scheduled to begin in 2024. This will increase the amount of contribution that women make to agricultural and climate resilience.
Despite the significant number of women who graduate with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees, women still have a low use rate and involvement in the digital world. This initiative is a part of the efforts the ECA makes throughout Africa to enhance those rates. “Our program helps women to navigate identified security concerns that hinder their utilization of technologies and introduces them to emerging tools that save their time and boost economic empowerment,” said Keiso Matashane-Marite, ECA Chief of section for Gender Affairs, in advance of the training. “Our program helps women to navigate identified security concerns that hinder their utilization of technologies.”
For her part, Zuzana Brixiova Schwidrowski, Director of the ECA office for North Africa, emphasized the importance of including more women in the Tunisian workforce to increase the country’s capacity for inclusive growth, reduce income inequality and mitigate the impact of population aging on the labor force. She said this was necessary to increase the country’s capacity for inclusive growth.
Women comprised 30.1% of Tunisia’s labor force in the second quarter of 2022, according to data compiled by the National Institution of Statistics of Tunisia, yet 21.1% of Tunisia’s female employees were jobless during the same period.
Following the COVID-19 conference, African nations saw a growth in their dependence on information and communication technologies (ICTs), digitalization, and online platforms to carry out economic transactions and learning and development activities. This transition gives women the chance to move into new economic responsibilities, allowing them to contribute to a more rapid economic recovery and sustained development.
