Organisation empowers females on entrepreneurship
By Olusegun Obisanya
The Founder of iStarter Hub, a social enterprise, Modupe Darabidan Adeoye has reiterated the need to train female gender to use technology and available resources to solve social challenges and become productive in life.
Narrating her background, she said technology is critical to economic breakthrough, women empowerment, saying that it is not as difficult as the story people tell concerning technology thereby forcing many talented young girls to abandon the tech space to the male counterpart.
She made the remarks during the closing ceremony of “The girls creativity hub, cohort 1” in Lagos recently where young girls some of whom are graduates in various disciplines. The event was witnessed by politician and social enterprise facilitators.
Adeoye said, “iStarter Hub is a social enterprise where we help young girls who learn to become productive using technology and resources that are available to them. They go from there to become entrepreneurs. The organisation was launched in 2016 with the aim of helping more women come to understand the essence of technology and those tools which they see around them can be used productively and also to help them to achieve goals that seem to be far from them.
“Information Technology is a tool that helps women to close the gap between them and men in the same space. I see technology as that tool that they can rely on to close that gap that exists between them and their male counterpart.”
Tagged, “Girls creativity hub initiative,” the founder explained that the programme is supported and sponsored by the United States Consulate office in Lagos under the AEIAF funding grant. The one year-long training is admits 100 girls both virtual and on-sight and broken into intensive twelve weeks of training. She said more than half of the participants come to the office for their on-sight training while the rest have their training online, in order to observe Covid-19 protocols.
“Essentially, the programme is to train 100 girls both online and offline. The online is for those who cannot come to the office because the organisation is observing Covid-19 guidelines as specified by the federal and state governments and their relevant agencies.
“We want to encourage the girls to harness the power of technology for their own good. We train the girls to be entrepreneurs with the skill that they’ve learnt. After they have completed their months of training, they go on compulsory three months internship programme that they all have to participate in. They get paid using the skills that they have learnt.
“The three months internship programme is to help them find resources they can use or to go to people that are already set up. These include graphic designing, which they can use to print on T-shirt. We introduce them to lucrative business like branding souvenir for parties.
According to her, the all-female affair intensive skill acquisition programme at iStarter Hub will commence another ‘cohort’ in the month of April.
The founder disclosed that the online registration for the next segment has been fully subscribed by passionate prospective entrepreneurs who had unquenchable interest in the activities of the organisation.
