This member story was featured in the 2016 APC Annual Report, as part of our work on use and development.
In June 2016, IT Girls, a UN-sponsored project, approached the One World Platform team with a proposal to become partners along with Microsoft BH and contribute to the project by providing training.
IT Girls organised two days of training in five smaller cities across Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the focus was on teaching 15-year-old girls about HTML, CSS and Java Script. The One World Platform team had the amazing opportunity to teach them about digital security and privacy basics. It was a great privilege to introduce them to Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Erna Hoover and other remarkable women whose contributions to STEM are not visible enough. We are very proud that we showed them a whole new world, and hopefully some of them will continue to nurture their love for technology. Each city and each group of girls proved to us that our work is meaningful.
The highlight of this experience was the training in the city of Srebrenica and the girls that we met there. The city itself, even 22 years after the war, is still associated with the genocide that took place in 1990, but now, for us, it has a beautiful connotation.
It is a place where girls from different ethnic groups were able to gather around technology, the place where we heard the most inspirational quote of the year, from a 12-year-old girl: “I wish for all women to disappear from the planet for one day, so men would realise how important, amazing and great women are.”
Image: © IT Girls.