Establish Women's Technology Education Center Project

Location: Şanlıurfa, Turkey

This project will be initiated for the benefit of Syrian refugee women and girls and disadvantaged local woman and girls living in the southeastern border city, Şanlıurfa, in order to support them to have jobs in an area compatible with the necessities of the time we live in: technological development for Industry 4.0.

Background

In Turkey, since 2011, more than 3.5 million Syrians are being hosted and almost 14% of them are living in Şanlıurfa city. From the very beginning of the refugee flow to Turkey, international institutions, national governmental bodies and civil society have been working hard to improve the living conditions of Syrians in and outside of the camp facilities. Starting with the basic needs support, today, the services evolved to providing refugees livelihood opportunities like vocational training courses, skills development seminars, etc. But unfortunately, this efforts are limited by an approach implies that all the well-educated refugees had moved to Europe by 2014’s huge human flow and the remaining under-qualified refugees can only be trained as low-wage labour force. Moreover, training efforts has stuck into a gender-based and highly restricted classification. If one checks some randomly selected livelihood programs of NGOs/CSOs operating in any city of Turkey, it can be easily seen that a refugee women can only receive training services on coiffure, handcrafts, home-based food production etc.

In such a restricted approach among CSOs’ activities, we’d like to create a difference for refugee and disadvantaged local women to open up a new way of life.

Project Specifics

This project aims to improve refugee and local women’s technological literacy, to acquire coding and robotics skills, to have knowledge of new age technologies and new job opportunities linked to these technologies, to create network for individual development and partnership opportunities, to study in a center where they can learn from and teach each other.

The projects is made up of two components:

Training of trainers: This component will aim to train women and men who are selected upon their application to become a trainer (preferably disadvantaged applicants). For the first year, 16 women and 16 men Syrian and Turkish applicants will be trained by our expert trainers on coding, robotics, Aurdiuno, IT and networking, Java development, mobile development, Phyton data science and web development, cyber security, graphic design. After successfully completing the training, they will get certificates, and selected 4 trainers will take charge in the project as paid staff, others will have chance to voluntarily participate.
Training of refugee and local women and girls: Under a 10-months long digital education program, groups made up of 16 women and girls from refugee and local disadvantaged community will be trained by our trainers on the subjects listed below. In total 750 women and girls will be trained and certificated.

Subjects

Program 1: Introduction to a Computer, Basic Computer Skills (Various levels), Introduction to Cyber Security, Graphic Design Fundamentals - UX/UI Design, Coding Fundamentals

Program 2: Internet Literacy & Safe Internet Usage, Individual Data Security, Effective Usage of Social Media Platforms, CV Writing, Job Searching & Entrepreneurship

Program 3: IT and Networking, Java Development, Mobile Development, Phyton Data Science, Web Development, Cyber Security, Graphic Design

Project Partner: