to Empower More African Women to Pursue Careers in IT
As part of the initiative, SmartCIC is asking the carrier community to donate unwanted IT equipment to be used in training, certifying, and inspiring Africa’s future digital leaders
Ghana, Africa, 28th November 2023 – SmartCIC, a global managed service provider, has partnered with Maxim Nyansa Foundation, an African non-governmental organisation (NGO), to provide young people across Africa with IT training, hardware, and micro-financing. The partnership is focused on enabling more African youth, in particular young women to build careers and launch successful IT businesses in their local areas.
SmartCIC is supporting Maxim Nyansa with specialist boot camp courses, hardware donations to its training centres and schools, and lending to start or expand small businesses. It will introduce three-month long, residential networking boot camps to equip and prepare young graduates for the new local and international job market by giving them access to valuable and affordable training. Women will have explicit priority for these training and startup programs.
“We are passionate about supporting the local markets that we operate in and providing young Africans, in particular women with new opportunities to build their careers in IT. This partnership enables us to share our expertise, leverage our network of customers and partners to provide equipment, and help more women in Africa gain high-value IT skills and certification,” said Catherine Hemingray, Sales Director and Co-Founder at SmartCIC. “We’re proud that 50% of our board are women and we believe women should play a larger role in tech and telecoms globally. Maxim Nyansa’s vision for education and empowerment directly aligns with the core beliefs within our business.”
SmartCIC is providing its used IT equipment to Maxim Nyansa for use in its training programmes and is asking that its carrier partners contribute unwanted hardware to the organisation. As part of the partnership, SmartCIC’s Barcelona warehouse will become Maxim Nyansa’s official depot for second-hand hardware in the south of Europe. It will use its global logistics offering to ship and deliver hardware to sites in Ghana, Nigeria and other West-African countries where Maxim Nyansa is located.
“At Maxim Nyansa, we take a bi-cultural approach to providing the less fortunate with a chance to be educated and equipped for their professional lives. With SmartCIC as one of our partners, we’re bringing together teams where Europeans and Africans are working together on a basis of equality and synergy,” said Diana Van Der Stelt, Co-Founder at Maxim Nyansa. “We’re excited to have the SmartCIC team host bootcamps and share their expertise in networking with our students. The contribution of used hardware enables more students to gain hands-on experience that will help develop careers in IT.”
Maxim Nyansa was established in Ghana in 2016. It provides almost 57,000 students with access to ICT labs, hosts more than 100 school projects, and has trained nearly 700 teachers in Burkina Faso, Gambia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Maxim Nyansa is supporting students in high schools across Africa by providing them and their teachers with much-needed IT infrastructure and educational software.
“Our goal is to support training and education in Africa as well as the development of sustainable IT businesses. We want the outcome of this partnership to be new, preferably women-owned businesses that SmartCIC can hire as part of our global network of engineers. That’s an ideal scenario,” said Toby Forman, CEO and Co-Founder at SmartCIC. “We’re excited to have ambassadors from our team host boot camps in Africa and share their knowledge. There’s an opportunity for the team to learn and gain new experiences in some of the most unique and dynamic markets in the world.”
Based on the success of this partnership, SmartCIC will look at growing this initiative in markets beyond Africa. There is potential for the development of similar training, certification and micro-financing initiatives in Latin America and Asia-Pacific regions.
