The 100 teachers were being trained to in turn train 1000 girls selected from the 33 municipality and districts of the region in basic ICT skills, coding and website development and cyber security within a month.

The initiative which was adopted by the MoCD was purposed to bridge the gender digital gap to achieve the Sustainable Develop­ment Goals (SDGs) four and five on equal access to education and gender equity respectively.

It would also give young girls the opportunity to be exposed to ICT at an early stage and enable them to gain an experience in the basics of the computer and to enable them to be guided in choosing courses and subjects related to their career development in future.

At the opening ceremony of the workshop, the Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Seth Kwame Ache­ampong, who was excited about the initiative stated that the current generation were among others gov­erned by the internet, hence the need to give them the necessary skills and opportunities to create wealth and secure their future.

“ICT has changed how people live. It has become a tool for our economic, interpersonal, societal transactions and interactions and it is important that we understand the rudiments of ICT so that it can be used to our advantage now and in future,” he said.

He noted that the girls could not gain the ICT experiences on their own without the guidance and directions of their own ICT teachers whom they were familiar with, and could confide in them when it comes to impartation of knowledge, skills and abilities, add­ing that necessitated the training of the 100 teachers to train the 1000 girls.

The Regional Minister thanked the teachers for accepting to be trained to acquire the requisite knowledge and skills to enable them to impart on the girls and be ambassadors of the programme.

He advised them to be guided by the code of ethics of their training, focus and concentrate to acquire the necessary information and skills that would bring transfor­mation to young girls and their generation.

For his part, the Programmes Manager at the Ministry of Com­munication, Isaac Newton Amezar, said the ministry developed the initiative after the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in a research identified that there were more boys in ICT than girls.

To solve the challenge, he said the ministry brought the initiative to help train more girls to bridge the gap and achieve an equal representation of ratio of boys to girls in ICT.

He expressed the hope that the ministry would be able to whip up the young girls’ interest in ICT and equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills to enable them to acquire high paying jobs in ICT in future.

He added it was also their hope that the girls would also develop interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education and choose career paths in STEM.