Dar es Salaam, Monday 4th March, Tanzania Data Lab (dLab) has organized a tailor-made data training program dubbed ‘Data4Her’, which aims to increase the percentage of women who use data in their day to day routine to contribute to global agenda of 50/50 percent participation in all sphere of life. The training has organized in line with the celebration of this year’s International Women’s Day.

“We wanted to do something special this year so as to celebrate the International women day under the theme ‘BalanceforBetter’,” said Ms. Mahadia Tunga, the dLab’s Director for Capacity Development. “These programs will help both women and young girls since they aim to enrich their potentials by social development and engage them in entrepreneurship, sciences and technologies. The secondary objective is for better understand and explore ways to mitigate and ultimately alleviate the under participation of women in the aforementioned careers.”

Data4Her program targeting young women employed at early career positions. The program acts as a bridge to managerial positions. The program aims at empowering women to make informed decisions, scale up career growth, create female data champions, and to establish a tech women database.

“We believe that without data there is no visibility and without visibility there is no priority as Data can shade light in hidden issues which can lead to changes in laws, policies, budget and decisions – especially when it comes to Education and Health,” said Ms. Mahadia.

She added, “This is why through a program of this nature, the aims of dLab of bridging the gender gap in data manipulation and usage amongst young women in Tanzania to help them make informed decisions and influence policy, will eventually be reached”.

This year dLab in collaboration with like-minded partners is also plan to conduct another workshop special for International Youth Day in August. The target is to reach 50 women. It will be an intensive five day program conducted in evenings from 2pm-5pm. The workshop commence time has taken considerations of working women. dLab plans to reach out to young women working in remote areas.

Tanzania Data Lab (dLab): Is a centre of excellence for data and data driven innovation that brings together critical components of the ecosystem that needs to be in place for evidence-based decisions. dLab started as a project in March 2016 under the Data Collaboratives for Local Impact program (DCLI) – which was funded by PEPFAR and implemented by MCC at the University Dar Es Salaam Computing Center (UCC) and later in February 2018, dLab was registered as an NGO which is affiliated with the University of Dar Es Salaam, College of ICT.