At Women Leaders in Technology (WLiT), their mission is to encourage passionate women studying technology to attain key leadership positions and equip them with technical and leadership skills. Despite being a progressive, fast growing, and lucrative field, technology witnesses barely 10 to 20 percent women’s participation. Thus, to change this situation, WLiT was established in 2015.
In conversation with Republica, Rashmi Bajracharya, operational manager and Chandani Neupane, the program coordinator of WLiT talked about the organization and their inspiration.
Who came up with an idea with this organization? What was the inspiration?
‘Women Lead’ and ‘Karkhana’ gave us leadership and technical training for one week. They made a proposal that after the program ends the group should work on the next session on their own. They started with the idea and we just implemented them. WLIT was established in 2015.
How do you recruit trainees for this workshop?
We recruit women who are interested to join our program that are from IT background. We choose female IT students doing Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering.
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What are the workshop’s exercises like?
We have had 2 boot camps. Every summer, we assembled a unique and diverse cohort of high potential and skilled leaders. It starts with two-week boot camp and follows into a yearlong follow-up program. In the first week, we teach leadership skills to the participants as we feel that this is an important skill required in every workplace. In the second week, we train IT programming skills, mainly focused on developing Android applications.
How do you guide them in their projects?
During those two weeks they should pitch ideas of their project they’re going to work on with us.
What we do is we give them options of what they can do, which is practical for them so that the project is successful.
As the trainees are a part of a one year commitment to our program, we hold monthly meetings to review their progress. By March we will be looking into what they’ve programmed (from what they’ve learned from us).
What kind of Android applications have been developed so far?
Until now, five android apps have been developed by our past fellows. Apps can be anything that interests the students. Some apps that have been made are: ATM app, ‘Pani Aayo’ for notifying, ‘Gantabya’ for navigating bus routes.
What is your long term goal for this organization?
Actually, we didn’t imagine ourselves nor did we have any plans to be an organization. But we were encouraged and assisted from various sides including Nepal Telecom Authority to register as an organization. Last year, we organized an event called ‘Hackathon’, where anybody could participate.
We also organized ‘Workshop on Wordpress’, and we have collaborated with different organizations to host workshops to create Android apps.
Initially, we were also supported by other organizations such as ‘Kazi Studio’ to host workshops but this year we have a plan to work independently on our own. We have planned to shift our focus from developing Android applications to JavaScript. Besides this, we also provide a designing workshop, where we discuss what ideas they’ve come with, listen to their goals, CV writing, and anything that will help them with their career.
