Some 1600 women from Region Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara) and Four (Demerara-Mahaica) graduated from the Women’s Innovation and Investment Network (WIIN) programme on Saturday and Sunday at the Human Services and Social Security’s “We Lift 3”.
The programme was conceptualised by the Human Services Ministry to provide women across the country with the training and tools to allow them to attain financial independence and security.
Grade One teacher Akesa Ellis, who has thus far completed the Introduction and Level Two courses related to childcare, described her overall learning experience as “wonderful” and an addition to her pre-existing knowledge on working with children.
“It will help me to better assist children in terms of if they are having difficulty, [I] will not just jump in thinking that these children are stubborn because there’s different problems that children can be affected by whether it’s psychological or so on,” Ellis said.
“I was able to learn how to cater for each child, because each child is able to learn differently so sometimes, something that may work for one may not work for the other,” she added.
Likewise, Nekisha Lewis also completed the first two courses related to childcare. “It was great, both online and face-to-face; the first course I did was face-to-face at the Department of Education building in Region Three and Level Two, I did online,” Lewis said.
Lewis plans on using the knowledge she has gained to eventually open a daycare and “venture off from there as an entrepreneur”.
Since the WIIN programme’s inception in 2020, over 4000 women have been trained at no cost, with 25 per cent of them opening their own businesses and 14 per cent of them gaining employment.
Efforts like this by the Government to involve women in every sector and ensure they are equally represented has been reflected in the report by the World Economic Forum, Human Services Minister Dr Vindhya Persaud relayed at “We Lift 3’s” opening ceremony.
“All of that was equivalent to us moving up 18 spots in one year as a country. What does [this] signal? That the gender gap is narrowing,” Persaud said. “We still have a lot of work to do, but it’s happening at a rapid pace.”
“These are the kinds of stats that give us the kind of credibility, encouragement and motivation that we want to have to keep on doing things the way we are doing it and doing even more than what we’re doing right now,” Persaud added.
These training programmes and courses have received United Kingdom (UK) accreditation due to the Ministry’s collaboration with Nations Inc and University of West Indies (UWI) accreditation through the UWI-ROYTEC collaboration.
“Then we also decided, why not ink something with Coursera and that opened the doors for thousands of women to access online, sound education from world class universities [where] they had to do stackable courses equivalent to Level One, Level Two, Level Three, Level Four,” Persaud said. “So, it’s giving them accredited certification that they can really use whichever way they want.”
The Human Services Ministry has received some 10,000 applications for the upcoming WIIN programme offerings and are hoping to train 6000 of those.
“This is an open appeal. Anybody who wants to offer funding so we can get the other 4000, come on board,” Persaud said.
The WIIN app, a component of the WIIN programme, through an upcoming collaboration with Mobile Money Guyana (MMG) will offer businesswomen a better platform to sell their products and services.
“This is what we want to do: Put those women’s businesses in your hands, network those women on a platform and MMG will take us to the point next month,” Persaud said.
