Sub-Saharan women risk exclusion from digital economy

Women in Sub-Saharan Africa have a high risk of missing out on the jobs of the future, as many of them are engaged in the types of job that are likely to be automated. The majority of the region’s women, therefore, risk exclusion from the digital economy because they are under-represented in fields such as IT, computing and engineering.

This is according to a forthcoming report entitled The Race against Time for Smarter Development.

A section of the UNESCO report, published on 11 February to mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science, notes that African countries have among the lowest proportions of women researchers in engineering and technology.

“Typically, African women are less present in this space,” said Alessandro Bello, lead author of the chapter on gender science in the report under the heading “To be smart, the digital revolution will need to be inclusive”.

Bello is also a former project officer at UNESCO’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and gender advancement (SAGA) unit. His co-authors include Dr Tonya Blowers, coordinator of UNESCO’s Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World programme.

The most recent datasets from UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics on the share of female tertiary graduates by academic fields show women in many Sub-Saharan African countries are lagging behind their male counterparts in cutting-edge fields such as engineering and artificial intelligence.

In 2018, for instance, the share of women among engineering and information and communications technology (ICT) graduates from Sub-Saharan African countries that were highlighted in the report was lower than that of male graduates.

In Ghana only 16.4% of women graduated with engineering degrees, with similar figures in Kenya (19.5%), Zimbabwe (20.5%) and Congo (15.7%). Countries such as Burundi (8%), Democratic Republic of Congo (9.8%) and Niger (7.5%) had engineering graduation rates among women of less than 10%.

Although women in Sub-Saharan Africa had slightly higher graduation rates in ICT than in engineering, their share was equally lower than that of their male counterparts.

In this regard, women’s share of Burundi’s tertiary graduates in 2018 was 26.6%, with Congo at 26.7%, Democratic Republic of Congo at 36%, Ghana at 19.9%, Kenya at 30% and Zimbabwe at 46%.

South Africa highest

At 32.2%, South Africa had the highest share of female graduates in Sub-Saharan Africa, while its share in ICT was also among the best, at 38.4%.

According to Gloria Muhoro, a technology and innovation specialist at the African Development Bank, the gender gap in digital skills in most parts of the world is more pronounced in the high-level skills required to create ICT software programmes, hardware and content.

“This global problem is even more pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is very little information about the situation of women in ICT employment opportunities and skills, their internet access and use, decision-making and gender applications of ICT in entrepreneurship,” says Muhoro.

North African countries, notably Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, are at the cusp of gender parity among graduates in ICT, engineering and other STEM fields on the continent.

In this aspect, Algeria’s share of women graduates and ICT stands at 48.5% and 48.9% respectively, while that of Tunisia is at 44.2% and 55.6%. Morocco has a gender engineering share of 42.2% and ICT at 41.3%.

One of the main concerns is how the majority of women in Sub-Saharan Africa are going to be part of the digital economy while they remain a minority in digital information technology, computing, physics, mathematics and engineering.

“These are the very fields that are driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and, thus, many of the jobs of tomorrow,” says the report.

The report suggests that, by 2050, half of the current jobs will have disappeared. “In other words, more than 60% of children entering primary school today could end up working in jobs that do not yet exist,” Bello said.

The further challenge is that 95% of these jobs are expected to have a digital component. According to the Equals Skills Coalition report Taking Stock: Data and evidence on gender equality in digital access, skills, and leadership, women in Africa are 23% less likely than men to be online, effectively making benefits of ICTs unevenly distributed.

Although Sub-Saharan African countries continue to report the lowest proportion of women researchers in engineering and technology, UNESCO says various initiatives have been launched in the sub-region to prepare African girls and women for a future in 4IR fields.

Girls can code

One example is African Girls Can Code, a four-year programme launched in 2018 which aims to teach 2,000 teenage girls digital and business skills by 2022 through 18 coding camps.

According to the report, the initiative (a joint programme of the African Union Commission, UN Women Ethiopia and the International Telecommunication Union) has so far trained 570 girls.

The Accra-based Women in Tech Africa and the Nairobi chapter of Women in Machine Learning and Data Science have launched similar programmes, while the East African Institute for Fundamental Research in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, has been providing scholarships to women.

According to the report, Senegal is also actively seeking to turn the situation around with its national research funding targeting advancement of women through a specific project for supporting female university researchers in the country.

“Between 2006 and 2015, Senegal raised the share of its women’s research pool from 10% to 29.3%,” says UNESCO.

But, as Bello and his associates point out, career prospects in STEM and especially in 4IR fields remain daunting, not just in the industry but even in academia, where women are often held to tougher standards for funding applications, peer review, tenure review and job applications.