Yielding Accomplished African Women (Yaa W.) is a non-profit organization on an ambitious mission. They aim to bridge the gender economic gap in Africa by providing a college to career pipeline for young African women. They are building the largest community of African female technologists and financial analysts for the continent.
Yaa W. has created Africa’s first professional STEM sorority. Also in 2019, they organized the continent’s first ever Women in Machine Learning conference.
In only two years of existence, their achievements have been phenomenal. They have impacted more than 800 women in ten African countries, propelled a 100% of their graduating fellows into tech/business roles and facilitated more than 10,000 hours of in-person and online training.
This year, they are set to expand their flagship program, “Our Girls Our Future”, for even wider coverage. Due to COVID-19, they are morphing the “Our Girls, Our Future” program to an 100% online talent accelerator. They will continue to maintain the length of the program, but will vary the daily schedule from 9am to 5pm to a shorter duration.
This year, they are training 1,000 African women that represent 8+ countries, 200+ universities and 150+ organizations across Africa. In two years, they have been able to scale their reach by 9900%. Yaa W. started off with 10 girls in 2018.
This is a career accelerator program that trains cohorts of ladies in tech and finance streams through a series of classes, assignments, seminars, interviews and internships.
At the end of the intensive training, the ladies are equipped with a gender-specific professional toolkit encompassing skills in personal branding, professional etiquette, MS Office, financial markets and analysis, macro/microeconomics, product design, programming skills, software development life cycle, amongst others. They’re also bolstered with a solid network of influential female professionals.
Formerly an in-person training, this year’s accelerator has been moved entirely online. In addition to this, the registration fee has been scrapped off, making it entirely free. A 1000 young women across Africa are going to be reached, with certification from IBM, Wall Street Prep and Grow With Google.
Find out more about Yielding Accomplished African Women at www.accomplishedafricanwomen.org
