ICT-Go-Girls Project

With this initiative, a European consortium led by Galician Supercomputing Centre designed, carried out and evaluated an innovative program to enhance entrepreneurship skills among secondary school girls, by using ICT as the key element. It is aimed at empowering girls with the knowledge, skills and values to help them be able to create future opportunities for innovation and quality ICT related employment. ICT-Go-Girls was financed by the UE between 2012-2014.

This project will involve relevant actors in this sector, (schools, universities, teacher training institutions, ICT research centres, educational administrations) in Europe and outside to combine efforts to propose an effective methodology to tackle this problem and with connections to maximize the impact of the initiative in their countries and at a European level. Its methodology and activities are directly aiming at supporting the achievement of several Key competences for lifelong learning as stated in the European Framework among secondary school girls, mainly: Entrepreneurship, Digital Competence,  Math literacy and Communication in foreign languages.

Can girls be entrepreneurs in school? What is an entrepreneur?

An “entrepreneur” undertakes innovations, finance and business vision in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods. When this is taken to a school level, we believe that in order to have young entrepreneurs there is a need to add knowledge to kids enthusiasm and teach them to develop their critical thinking together with their imagination. This will result in new and useful ideas that will surprise all of us and can make them life entrepreneurs.

Objectives

  • Enhance entrepreneurship skills among secondary school girls.
  • Produce a methodology and learning toolkit for secondary schools to promote ICT and entrepreneurship among their female students
  • Improve teachers methodologies to promote entrepreneurship and ICT skills among school girls and deliver them support tools
  • Increase ICT skills for educational issues among school girls
  • Show the empowerment potential of ICTs to girls in order to face their future choices in studies and work.
  • Improve the following cross-curricular skills: Initiative, Group work, Language learning
  • Encourage cooperation between the worlds of education, training and work.
  • Establish a sustainability plan involving business, ICT related institutions, schools and administrations to create a stable network to pursue the main goal of the project Europe-wide.

We believe that ICT can provide a flexible and potential motivational environment for empowering these young women in their future choices, their studies and jobs.