Regina Agyare is an absolute inspiration to woman everywhere! Regina is a young woman living in Accra, Ghana, who co-founded Tech Needs Girls, a program to teach girls coding. "Computing jobs are among the fastest growing and the highest paying, yet few women are benefiting from these occupations," she explains to CNN. "This trend increases social inequalities and barriers to girls' future life opportunities."
Empowering women is especially important in Ghana, a place where women are often thought of as domestic objects and are not given an education. It's a program that would have a valuable application stateside, too: Even though more women are studying science, engineering and technology, the number of women in computer-related jobs has actually dropped.
This is obviously not a problem of women not being interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, but of women being discouraged from those fields by men or even other women. According to Agyare, some of the boys said that they felt it wasn’t right to empower women. The way she responded to those assertations is truly amazing. Instead of preventing those boys from joining the class, Agyare welcomed them. Now, they’re not only learning about coding, but also about women and what it means to empower them.
Agyare’s inclusion of boys in her class is something that Emma Watson’s UN initiative, He for She, matches with quite nicely. The concept behind He for She is to encourage men to call themselves feminists. Not only is Regina bringing feminism to both young girls and boys in her classes in Ghana, but she is also proving education in a field that these girls would not otherwise receive.