Women Developers of The Future - SDG 4, 5 and 8.
Description
The ICT sector offers highly skilled, well paid jobs but fails to attract women. Women are still less likely to take up ICT studies and are less represented. Turkey is 17th largest economy but is listed amongst the lowest in terms of female labor participation (%28). It shows that there is a long way for Turkey to unleash its women's labor potential. Women Developers of the Future project is playing an important role in creating women leadership and entrepreneurship. Through education and upskilling, Turkcell has empowered women about mobile application development, increase their employment and entrepreneurship in mobile sector.
The main difference of the project is helping people to realize their dreams at a pace they thought was not possible. None could imagine that they could write a line of code let alone, work in teams create projects get mentored on both business and technology by professionals . With the help of the project, they learned how to put their ideas into a practice and solve the real-life problems with their mobile application ideas. <br />
The objectives of the project can be summarized as follows:<br />
• Contribution to digital transformation in Turkey<br />
• Increasing the use of domestically made products in the information sector<br />
• Increasing the competitiveness of Turkey by training qualified employees for the information sector<br />
• Contributing to the economy by supporting women entrepreneurs<br />
• Providing equal opportunity to women in the information sector<br />
• Supporting ideas that create potential and social value to Turkey<br />
• Helping women to get trained for acquiring a new profession <br />
• Creating synergy between technology and social life via applications that enhance life <br />
• Supporting the creation, implementation and maintenance of an information sharing culture<br />
• Enhance the entrepreneurship culture within the society <br />
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The target group is any women 18 years of age and above, with an education level of high school and up across Turkey. Turkcell provides online and face to face trainings on Android Application Development, using Java Android Studio, Google firebase platform. Turkcell also ensure a comprehensive and detailed content from project’s web platform. The women have taken 1.836 hours face to face and 46.200 hours online mobile application development trainings, from basic to advanced levels. After the 6 month learning journey, amongst the graduates, in groups, more than 770, created 200+ mobile applications, including a total of 2.3 million lines of code, for health, tourism, social responsibility, e-commerce, travel and many more. The trainers and mentors have travelled 170.000 km in 6 months. There is a good number of graduates who have been employed as mobile developers. <br />
With this training we make able hundreds of women to realize their imagined ideas. 203 applications came out. Top 3 are below:<br />
- Otizmio: The app aims the early detection of autism symptoms in children via wearable technology.<br />
- Ham Yap: The app aims to help parents feed their kids healthily and easily through the recommendation of this Ham Yap app<br />
- Yubiva: The app aims to give sign language training to our hearing-impaired kids through Augment Reality technology.<br />
In the final phase, Turkcell took one more step by employing the best 100 women out of the program as “application testers’’. These women are responsible to take on user acceptance and usability tests of Turkcell’s strategic product & service mobile applications. These women are working remotely and based in 25 different cities. The second year of the program, Turkcell is committed to employ 100 more women. Testers is the key element of the project which present the sustainability feature of the project.
Sedef Yavuz testimonial:
I owe my new career to the project. I was working as a babysitter and had no idea what to do with my life. My friend Deniz recommended the program to me and a year later I am selling my first app on Google Play. I was then offered an internship in Ankara and now I work full time as a mobile application developer. Every day I am waking up happily.
Thousands of program applicants from 60 out of 81 provinces, have gone through an extensive online and face to face mobile application development and entrepreneurship program with mentoring support .They have taken 1836 hours face to face and 46.200 hours online mobile application development trainings, from basic to advanced levels, in 18 cities.
During this 6 month journey, they learned to innovate, create, to take risks, fail forward and do all of these whilst working in teams . They worked in teams, 200+ mobile applications and business plans, including a total of 2.3 million lines of code that providing benefits to society for different sectors. The trainers and mentors have travelled 170.000 km in 6 months.
With this project Turkcell provides opportunities for women to build innovative mobile applications. Turkcell gave mobile application development trainings to our participants and afterwards one of the attendee combined this knowledge with aurduino knowledge and developed Wecycle app which is vocally directing visually disabled people and made them able to ride bicycle or another product Yubiva which is again a combination of Android, Augmented Reality with Arduino and teaching sign language for deft people in an innovative way.
On the other hand, we gave mentorship on Turkcell Bip Messenger to women living in different cities in concurrently. Turkcell Bip Messenger makes able 6 people to talk face to face concurrently. As a result, attendees were able to develop their product in an effective way by taking online face to face consultancy.
In addition, we dedicated some experienced testers as mentors in order to build testing skills of our new hired employees. These mentors explained what the bug is, how a tester can find a bug, how a bug should be reported. They analyzed the bugs reported by new hired testers, and gave their feedbacks to each women differently. BiP Messenger was used for the communication between mentors and new hired women employees.
Elif one of the nine sibling who were not able to go to school because of economical restrictions has been supported by Turkcell financially to study in her whole school life. After graduation she has taken projects trainings and now she will be employed by one of the leading Technology company.
Suzan was born with a visual impairment and eventually developed the ability to see. She dreamed of developing projects that would make life easier for the visually impaired ever since she was a little girl. The Women Developers of the Future Program helped her realized her dream, Her project, NeBu, was chosen for one of the top 10 projects for the finals. NeBu enables visually impaired people to shop and pay easily
Melike was born in Mardin in a family of 8 children. While continuing her education with limited resources, amidst the participating Women Who Develop the Future, she generated project ideas that would generate solutions for the disadvantaged community. Her project, WeCycle, was among the top 10 projects. WeCycle supports visually impaired children ride a bicycle without any aid.
With this project 100 women coming from especially from developing regions has been already employed, they have the chance to work at their home. As a result 100 people has been included to the production. On the other hand the apps developed by women who has taken these training developed some apps which are easing the life of disabled people.
Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all has been covered. It is important on all levels to encourage women leadership, empowerment and entrepreneurship to create powerful agents of change for sustainable development. Through education and upskilling with the program we have created women who can imagine, create and impact at the personal and social level.
To increase the number of women working in ICT sector Turkcell especially focus on the women and launched Women Developer of The Future project which is also serving for UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girlsâ€ÂÂ.
We have met thousands of women from all over Turkey who believed they can learn to change their lives for the better. 1836 hours face to face and 46.200 hours online mobile application development trainings, from basic to advanced levels, in 18 cities.
They worked in teams, 200+ mobile applications and business plans, including a total of 2.3 million lines of code that providing benefits to society for different sectors. The trainers and mentors have travelled 170.000 km in 6 months.
Amongst the graduates, in groups, more than 770, created 200+ mobile applications for health, tourism, social responsibility, e-commerce, travel and many more.
100 women from 25 different cities were employed as application testers at Turkcell with the opportunity to work remotely, have contributed to make Turkcell's strategic applications better buy finding bugs and proposed 400+ new features since January 2018.
The 2018 program is now stronger with the support and advocacy of the First Lady of Republic of Turkey Presidency. The new program will be launched on Nov 27th at the Congress Hall of the Presidency in Ankara. We are aiming to reach and change the lives of 1 million women in three years.<br />
This year, the project will not only have the entrepreneurship journey but will have a Digital Literacy program hoping to aim and reach all women to learn basic skills.<br />
<br />
More Cities: Training and improvement opportunity for greater number of women.<br />
More Extensive Software Training: We increased s in-class Mobile Application Development lectures from 36 to 84 hours.<br />
More Effective Teaching and Mentoring Process: An assisting teacher will be appointed, alongside the main teacher in in-class lectures.<br />
Apart from software training, guidance regarding business models and entrepreneurship will be provided.<br />
More Projects Coming to Life: Turkcell will continue to support projects up until their launch in Google Play <br />
Digital Literacy Journey: Equal learning opportunity will be offered to participants regardless of their age or knowledge level<br />
Inclusion of Syrian Refugees as Participants into the Program: The Merhaba Umut (Hello Hope) application and special communication through social media will be executed in order to increase participation.<br />
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The project aims to reach 1 million women in 3 years to come.
https://www.posta.com.tr/emine-erdogan-gelecegi-yazan-kadinlar-projesi-…
GSMA - Caseforchange initiative is preparing an article on project. It will be published in January 2019.
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Feyza User, International Relations Expert