By Manal Abdel Fattah
The Embassy of Latvia in Egypt welcomed two experts from a Latvian non-governmental association Riga TechGirls – the first community in Latvia aimed at educating and inspiring women & girls about all things digital. The visit allowed two Riga TechGirls experts – Ms Līna Marta Sarma, Board Member, and Mr Pauls Siliņš, Senior Project Manager, to meet many prominent local NGOs working towards digital skills capacity building and empowering women using modern technologies. In their view, Egyptian NGOs have many impressive initiatives encouraging women to seek knowledge, start small businesses and aspire to work in fields of IT and engineering, therefore the rapport was immediate and discussions fruitful.
A highlight of the visit was the #Riga TechGirls seminar, aptly called “Digital Skills & Tools for NGOs”, organised in cooperation with National Telecommunications Institute (NTI) and the Embassy of Latvia. Among the attendees were representatives from MCIT (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology), National Women’s Council (NWC) and a multitude of local NGO representatives.
During the seminar, Ambassador of Latvia, Mr Andris Razāns emphasized the importance of ICT sector in Latvia and the desire to cooperate in digital transformation capacity building with Egyptian partners. Current technological developments are changing societies and in future, digitally advanced societies will have more opportunities and they will be more resilient towards societal changes brought upon by the advent of digital era and artificial intelligence. Latvia’s experience and lessons learned in tackling digitalisation in our country might be applicable elsewhere. Our readiness to shoulder the responsibility for our common future is also reflected by Latvia’s aspirations to become a first-time member of the United Nations Security Council in the 2025 elections.
The Riga TechGirls delegation also exchanged experience with local experts from EU Delegation, USAID and GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) and visited IVY International School in Cairo to gain insights into it’s STEM based curriculum.
The fact-finding mission was concluded with a number of essential observations, such as importance of localization, availability of training in Arabic, significance of reaching rural areas and considering people with disabilities. #Riga TechGirls is a community geared towards supporting inclusion across STEM. One of the main goals of the organization has been to inspire and encourage more women to become a part of IT workforce and advance their digital skills. The association is seeking partners in Egypt working towards similar objectives and are welcome to reach out. More about Riga Tech girls can be found here: www.rigatechgirls.com
