School of IT awarded research grant by IDRC

“Towards Gender Justice in STEM Research in Africa”, a research collaboration under the leadership of Prof Ulrike Rivett in the Department of Information Systems in the Faculty of Commerce, has received funding for three years from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of the Government of Canada for ZAR 13 million (CAD 1.2 million).

The project is one of the many initiatives that also shows the cross- faculty collaborations within the School of IT, as A/Prof Melissa Densmore from the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Science is the Co-I on the project.

As part of the IDRC’s “Pathway to Change Programme", the research project intends to create pathways, resources and tools to facilitate women and gender-diverse people to be fully and actively included in STEM Research. Together with three African partner countries and the United Kingdom, the project looks at using co-design as an approach to analyse the motivations, barriers and success factors for women and gender diverse people in the fields of IT, Data Science, Human Computer Interaction and ICT for Development.

The team is particularly excited about the opportunity to develop and pilot a curriculum focused on women students in Data Science and to encourage a new generation of data science researchers. Building on a previous project “GeDIA – Gender Just Design in Africa” that was funded by the UK GCRF funding since 2018, this project will extend the established network of women and gender-diverse researchers to support the ongoing professional development of future leaders.

[Note: UCT project collaborators are Makerere University (Uganda), Asikana Women Network (Zambia), INIIT (Kenya ), Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (Kenya) and Sheffield University (UK).]