The government yesterday signed an agreement with Microsoft Bangladesh to develop skills of the women working in state-run digital centres and also help them become entrepreneurs.
Sonia Bashir Kabir, managing director of Microsoft Bangladesh, and Kabir Bin Anwar, project director of the Access to Information (a2i) programme under the Prime Minister’s Office, inked the memorandum of understanding.
Michelle Simmons, general manager of Microsoft Southeast Asia for new markets, was also present at the event at the PMO.
Under the agreement, women working in 5,273 digital centres will receive training on computer hardware and software use and troubleshooting. They will be linked to service centres after the training, according to a statement.
Through the Digital Literacy Training Programme, women will gain expertise on digital centre activities and be able to help local people with hardware and software support.
“Establishing a digital centre in every union with one woman entrepreneur along with a man is very important for materialising the Digital Bangladesh vision,” Anwar said.
“There will be an opportunity for rural women to get IT support if at least one woman entrepreneur is there. The Microsoft initiative will help those women entrepreneurs move forward,” he said in the statement.
Sonia said: “We believe women are an integral part of our society, and it is my passion to promote women in technology.”
“We look forward to promoting Bangladeshi women in technology, taking them from employability to entrepreneurship and enabling them to integrate technology in their daily and professional lives,” she said.
“We will turn them into service engineers,” she told The Daily Star.
Technology-based modern centres from every union, district, municipality and different wards of city corporations are now called digital centres.
So far, about 20.60 crore services were provided through these centres. More than 20 lakh people applied online for visits abroad, and 4.5 lakh people applied from the centres and got their land records, according to the joint statement from a2i and Microsoft.
These centres allow people to see public exam results, apply for university admissions and birth-death certificates, use email and the internet and get IT training.
Each centre employs one woman and one man.
Some 400 women entrepreneurs from 11 city corporations and 1,500 women entrepreneurs from 15 districts have already received training from Microsoft. The rest will get training throughout 2016.
