Eleven women, all in their early twenties, set off for Pittsburgh in the US last night, where they are to complete their Masters degrees in software engineering at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University.
You have all been drawn from small towns or rural areas into a field that is dominated by whites and dominated by males and the advanced world.
Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, Minister, Department of Communications
All are from disadvantaged areas, and they have already completed a BSc degree with Computer Science as a major.
"You have all been drawn from small towns or rural areas into a field that is dominated by whites and dominated by males and the advanced world," said minister of communications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who took time out from an executive committee meeting of the African National Congress to bid the group farewell.
The group will be the first to emerge from a programme initiated by the government department of communications and funded by the Vodacom Foundation, aimed at improving the level of IT skills available in SA.
Some 33 women are expected to complete their Masters in software engineering over the next three years as part of the Vodacom sponsorship. No local university currently offers a comparable programme.
The group completed the first year of their two-year Masters through a distance learning programme conducted at the Institute for Satellite and Software Applications (ISSA) in the Western Cape, where facilities such as video conferencing allowed contact with Carnegie Mellon lecturers.
The ISSA is also known as Houwteq, as it was named by defence company Denel when it was established as the base of a project aimed at producing South African spy satellites.
Richard Gerber, who started up the training programme and is now the chief knowledge officer of the department of communications, says the facility was taken over for the project after it was under-utilised following the shelving of the spy satellite project in about 1992.
It was first used as training base with a group of 36 students in a Microsoft Certified Software Engineer (MCSE) programme in 1998.
"We had some scepticism back then," Gerber recalls. "These were people from rural universities. But they were motivated, and we had a 100% pass rate."
In 1999 a group of 74 students were involved in three training streams, MCSE, Cisco Certified Network Associate training, and a post-graduate engineering qualification hosted by the University of Stellenbosch.
Matsepe-Casaburri said the institute, and especially the software Masters programme, is aimed at training trainers to promote the spread of IT skills within the country. "I would like to see these young women coming back with their Masters degrees and taking the opportunity to work in our universities to train other young women in this field," she said.
It is hoped that a similar degree will be offered by a local university, based on the skills brought back by the qualified groups.
Queen Ethel Ngobeni, one of the students in the group, says she will be coming back to SA to share what she learns in the US, despite the probable temptations private companies will offer for her skills.
"I will probably work inside the department [of communications] at least for a while," she says. "It would be unfair to go over there, be sponsored, and then not plough back what I learn from it."
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