The EU4Digital Facility will organise a workshop dedicated to the activity of women mentorship programmes in tech on 18 December. This is the final session, which aims to develop a practical action plan to guide the implementation of the mentorship programmes in the Eastern Partnership region.

Since the beginning of the Women’s mentorship programmes in tech activity, identified local beneficiary organisations have been actively involved in a series of working sessions to help prepare them to take over the implementation of the mentoring programmes. The sessions were focused on: women’s position in the local tech markets; organisations’ experiences in mentoring and other women in tech awareness raising practices; organisations’ readiness to implement the mentorship programme and build deeper knowledge on mentoring by introducing examples of success cases, components of the fruitful mentorship programme set-up, and ways for practical implementation. 

On 18 December, the EU4Digital Facility in collaboration with practitioners from the EU organisation Women Go Tech will get together local organisations to develop the actions that need to be taken to kick-off the women mentorship programmes in the Eastern partner countries. 

The main focus of the workshop is to define the readiness and actions that need to be taken by local organisations to launch pilot programmes in local markets. The discussion will therefore consist of the following perspectives: setting up a programme structure and content for target audience and educational activities, and setting up the financial, human and technical resources requirements of a programme.

During this practical workshop, the defined implementation points to design the action plan will be considered by participants from partner country organisations. Besides that, the session aims to provide the possibility for networking, thus, strengthening regional cooperation, new partnerships or even exchange of mentors – subject matter experts –within the programme of the participating organisations.

The representatives of the six countries who will take part in the final workshop on 18 December are the following: 

• Girls in Tech Armenia (Armenia);
• Azerbaijani Women in ICT Club – Femmes Digitales (Azerbaijan); 
• EPAM (Belarus);
• Georgia’s Innovation and Technology Agency (GITA) (Georgia);
• Moldovan Association of Information and Communications Technology Companies (ATIC) (The Republic of Moldova);
• Girls in STEM (Ukraine).

This is the closing workshop of the Women mentorship programme in tech activity. As a result of this session, EU4Digital is to finalise a know-how package and prepare an action plan by the end of 2020. The expected outcome is for local organisations to take over the further development of similar mentoring programmes in their countries considering the aspects of regional cooperation.