The Azila Investment Holding with Siyafunda Community Technology Centre in partnership with the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services (DTPS) took to Shap Stadium offices in Mofolo to engage with young women from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, disabled and those women from past abusive experiences.
This follows the Intel She Will Connect initiative by the DTPS aimed at empowering young women through technology and to close gender gaps in technology access and career opportunities.
The programme also intends to allow involved individuals to use technology to connect to economic and social opportunities.
The sessions saw facilitator from Siyafunda technologies sharing information and guidelines on how one can open and run a functional organization (for self-empowerment purposes).
This included basic computer literacy lessons and training in Information Communication Technology systems.
The engagement came after DTPS had a request to Azila Investment that they should work together in finding solutions to assist the “violence oppressed” individual in understanding that regardless of their past and conditions, they can still have better future.
Azila Investment CEO Buyisiwe Gumede indicates that taking to the street with placards sending messages “enough with violence” is not the only solution.
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But giving people hope through skills to be able to stand on their feet could also be the best solution.
“As ICT section we don’t have that much power or platform to walk the streets with placards sending the “enough is enough” messages on general violence in our society.
“But the skills that we are having technological wise, we can still do something helpful to protect and send the very same message in these violent ill behaviours. But most importantly we should also give these people necessary skills to be employable in other to survive,” she indicates.
Gender and Disability in Capacity Development Director Thandi Mdlalose say that losing self-confidence is like losing who you are hence it’s important that the affected people should get their self-esteem back in order to get their lives back.
“We conducted these training with different organizations and we found that these violent behaviours have a very big negative impact on the affected people.
“These people lose hope and can’t even go out to look for jobs as some believe that what happened to them is their mistake. But through all that, we are happy that these programs are bringing change in their lives. And we believe that they will be fully back to what they aimed to be in future,” she says.
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