Rural women to get ICT training

Six buses equipped with ICT training materials will travel across the country to reach marginalised and underprivileged women under a project of the ICT Division.

The project aims to enhance job skills of women who cannot move from their own localities to seek such training and jobs due to socio-economic barriers.

Each bus will be air-conditioned, soundproof and equipped with 25 workstations. Training infrastructure will include one laptop per trainee, large format LED screens, sound systems, Wi-Fi, customised training modules, learning software and generators.

The buses will be ready for launch by January 2016 and will target more than 2.4 lakh women in hard-to-reach areas in the next three years, said Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister for the ICT Division.

The initiative will create new jobs for women as they will learn how to use new technologies, said Palak. “If this becomes successful, we will make further plans.”

The buses will also act as experience zones, opening new horizons for the rural women, he said.

Mobile operator Robi and China's telecom vendor Huawei will directly support the project, according to a memorandum signed at the ICT Division in Dhaka yesterday.

Md Manjur Kadir, joint secretary of the ICT Division, Zhao Haofu, chief executive officer of Huawei Technologies (Bangladesh), and Mahtabuddin Ahmed, chief operating officer of Robi, signed the memorandum.

Each bus will train about 40,000 young women in three years.

The project will also organise roadshows in rural areas to help popularise ICT education not only among women, but also among school and college students, senior officials of the project said.

Training materials will be provided free of cost and the training modules and trainers will be facilitated and supervised by the ICT Division.    

Each bus will have individual route plans and will be operational for 40 weeks a year, with each location receiving one or two days of training, depending on the number of local participants.