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International Women’s Day “Girls Innovate for Change”
What better way to celebrate International Women's Day than by inspiring and empowering young girls from all over Kosovo!
Today we have gathered 40 young ambitious girls coming from Gjakova, Vushtrri, Viti, Kamenice, Kaqanik, Ferizaj, Shtërpcë, and Brod in Prishtina to take part in our "Girl Innovate for Change" event.
The activity started with the opening speeches from Ms. Edi Gusia, Chief Executive of the Agency for Gender Equality, stated that: “Science is the strongest tool to fight inequality”. Followed by Mr. Besim Beqaj from Ministria e Inovacionit dhe Ndërmarrësisë, stated the importance of having a gender-balanced cabinet and how it enhances the efficiency of the Ministry. Mrs. Ulrika Richardson UN Development Coordinator said: “Women’s day is being celebrated for 100 years now, however, we still continue to fight for better equality... The main principles of the UN when drafting the Sustainable Development Goals, are to Innovate and to reach gender equality. The speeches were closed by Mrs. Abetare Gojani, director of IPKO Foundation said that to reach our country's full potential it is imperative that we help women become independent, and to get them to participate in every working sector of Kosovo.
The second part of the day featured 2 workshops. Through practical learning by doing, these young participants were able to gather knowledge from different fields of technology, learning the basics of each field and will also be given sources of information to further develop and grow their skills. The first workshop organized by BONEVET, taught the girls how to combine 20 different parts into a functioning robot m+Bot which can understand and execute commands. In addition, they had a chance to work with Arduino technology and understand to programme certain actions. The second workshop by Akademia jCoders taught them how to program a game by using “Scratch”, through which they created different types of virtual labyrinths.
The activity was closed by our inspirational speaker, Rrezarta Pllana - Ph.D. Candidate for Management with Informatics. She shared her inspiring story of the difficulties being only one of the few women in the ICT department at her university. She encouraged the participants to seek out new hobbies, activities, and never put a limit on what they can achieve.
Through this activity, we also had the opportunity to support and promote the importance the Sustainable Development Goals. More specifically this project focused on 2 major SDG's, goal 4: Quality Education and goal 5: Gender Equality.
When we empower women, we empower our country!
Thank you to our partners:
UN Women Kosovo, Unicef Kosovo Programme, Agjencia per Barazi Gjinore, KUSA