Wings made of code
Transcriber: Phan Nam
Reviewer: Nihal Aksakal
I’m Madinah, I’m 16 years old
and I live in Kabul, Afghanistan.
When you first heard Afghanistan,
what comes to mind?
Probably bombings, war and crime.
Girls are not allowed
to go out much here in Kabul.
But I want everyone to see my country,
see it beyond the chaos.
See it for the people, the culture
and the hospitality.
I’m also Hilda.
A 14 year old from Belize City.
I got shot
in my right leg a couple years ago,
during one of many gang wars
here in Belize City.
Men in my community have been to prison.
But they are not bad people.
I want to help train and console prisoners
here in Belize
after they return home.
I’m also Deandra from Jamaica.
Jamaica is the land of wood and water,
and I want to preserve that distinction.
I want to raise awareness
of the plight of these marine animals
that live in our waters.
I want to save them.
Don’t forget my names, I Madinah,
I am Hilda, I am Deandra.
But today, I am Kaavya Krishna,
representing the voices of over 130
million other young girls like me
around the world that have goals
and dare to dream.
I’m a financially independent
woman originally
from a developing country who
knows how to code.
And in my mind, that is the most prepared
state of being for the future
for girls and women like me.
Note; key word that makes
the state of being slightly
difficult as woman
and another that makes it even more
difficult is developing country.
In 2019, I spent a week teaching coding
to society women coders,
to these high school
girls in Belize City.
And this is where I first met Aisha.
Just like the Andrea, Hilda and Madina,
Aisha came into the camp with
no understanding of coding
or entrepreneurship.
During the camp, she built a website
to represent her entrepreneurial project.
Through her project, Aisha wanted to solve
the issue of sargassum pollution
in the Caribbean Ocean.
For those of you who don’t know,
Sargassum covid crisis continues to affect
life on the Caribbean coast.
What happens is the sargassum begins to
rot at the coast and accumulates,
which disrupts life both inside
and outside the ocean.
Aisha wanted to clean the coasts
of this sargassum
and make usable products like furniture
and fertilizer out of it.
She not only came up with this idea,
but she came up with the whole business
prototype of how she will collect it,
utilize it and set up a community
selling service.
She even incorporated forms
for volunteers sign up in her website
All in a week’s time from scratch.
Hilda was part of the same camp
and her project was an online portal
for prisoner counseling.
Madinah built a website to promote tourism
in Afghanistan,
and I wrote to her camp last year.
And Deandra build a project to preserve
marine life in Jamaica
during our climatehackat this year.
So what I want you guys to pay attention
to here today
is that these teenage girls from
all around the world
have the aspiration to solve some of
the greatest issues of our world.
Economic development, climate change,
criminal rehabilitation and war.
And they saw an opportunity through
these scams and made use of the platform
to gather the required
technical skills in order to take
that first step towards solving something
that affects them.
Reason being that their survival
and happiness is entangled around these
regional issues
that make for the bigger global problems.
Opportunities like these camps
are rare in these communities,
but are exactly what is needed to foster
sustainable solutions
to our global problems.
With skills like coding, girls can be
steered to solve local issues,
girls can be steered
to solve local issues,
to make money and to change status quo.
Three years ago, we started a society
of women coders to create
an army of such girls around the world.
And we have directly impacted
over 200 girls in 27 developing countries
all around the world, by introducing
them to just do things:
Coding and social entrepreneurship.
A survey done by the World Economic
Forum suggests that 42 percent
of the core job skills required today will
change substantially in the coming years.
Pushing more women towards learning
digital skills
is the best way to ensure
their financial security
and independence in the future,
and especially in underdeveloped
and developing countries.
The fight of the future is not going to
be about Excel sheets of other points,
it’s going to be about
not becoming obsolete.
And to stay relevant, we need
our girls updated
on the most lucrative skills of our time:
Goading and financial literacy.
So the goal is to help more women
attain financial independence
in the coming years
and efficiently so with education,
career and jobs in technology.
Let’s talk about financial independence.
How many here think that financial
independence makes for happier women?
To me, that sounds like a fact,
but to back it up,
there is research and studies
that show that
a direct connection can be drawn between
the economic dependency of the women
on the men of the household
and the victims of mental abuse
and domestic violence.
Financially independent women
are less likely to fall victim
to mental abuse and
domestic violence.
Financial independence helps
women to be more confident,
freewilled and better leaders.
Which not only makes them happier,
but leads to happier families
and a more wholesome life.
So I know I threw a lot of information
at you all here today.
Keywords: Future, women, tech, developing
countries, financial independence,
happiness. I would like to
point out that there is
a gap between how we perceive
happy women
and what science and surveys point out.
Humans have been
able to imagine a society on Mars
and send a TESLA in space.
But the notion of equality here
on Earth is still strange to most.
So we have to prepare our girls.
We need Ahmadinejad to know that
they are equipped
with the coding skills required to build
an app for tourism in Afghanistan
and even build a business around it
in the future when they grow up.
We need our Hildas to know that training
and mentoring prisoners
can be done through
a socially funded venture
that will not only employ her,
but allow her to create employment
for more girls like her in Belize.
We need our leaders to be confident enough
to start their own nonprofit organization
and save the wildlife
around the world.
We need our girls to know
that they are capable and ready.
Society of women coders aims
to create opportunities
for young women through technical
training and mentorship
and more importantly, change perceptions
in the communities that needed the most.
Teaching young girls early
on that they do not need
a fairy godmother to help them fly.
They can make their own wings
made of gold.
Thank you.