CODING IN KAZAKHSTAN: GIRLS POWER FUND AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY.

• Author: Auyelbekova, Dinara

Dinara Auyelbekova is the Founder and Director of Girls Power Fund, an organization that designs and delivers innovative solutions to address gender inequality in rural Kazakhstan by promoting girls' access to STEM education. The Journal spoke with Dinara to discuss the progress Girls Power Fund has made in training the next generation of software engineers and technology leaders, the ability of technology to bridge the gap between rural and urban young women, and the difficulties of founding and funding a new organization in the face of societal challenges.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): Introduce us to the organization you founded and currently run, Girls Power Fund. Why did you start this initiative, and what is some of the current work that you're doing?

Dinara Auyelbekova (DA): During Covid in 2020, I took a gap year because I wanted to figure out what I want to do with my life. It was trial and error. I tried different things during this year, and I ended up starting the Girls Power Fund.

We work on empowering girls in STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math, and we provide different trainings in those fields so that girls can pursue careers in STEM. And what motivated me is that I live in a very patriarchal, conservative society. If you see the statistics of women representation in business, in politics, in all STEM fields, it's a very tiny percentage. There are also a lot of instances of sexual assaults, rapes. There is no law that protects women in Kazakhstan, so if a woman goes to the police and wants to report a domestic violence case, the police will probably will not consider it, and they will try to cover it, to hide it, and just won't take this report. So I was fed up with this stuff, reading it on the news. And there was no change.

I decided that I wanted to start empowering girls earlier, because it's hard to work with the victims of domestic abuse and empower women after traumatic events. I decided to work with the root cause and start empowering girls at the younger age, so that they hopefully won't end up in financial abuse or domestic abuse. It usually happens when girls marry young, when they marry at the age of 18, especially in some regions of Kazakhstan. Then they don't get higher education. They start giving birth. They have 5 kids at the age of 30, and then obviously, they can't do anything. They can't get out of the situation because they don't have any means to sustain themselves and their children.

So I believe that education is like the cliche that can solve this problem. Education helped me to achieve all of my goals. I was lucky because I studied in a good university, I know English, and my parents were really invested and supportive, but soon I realized that it's not the case for everyone in my country, and I decided to help provide what I had in my life and what helped me in my life, so that people would be able to fulfill their potential and hopefully not end up in situations like this.

JIA: To achieve your goal, you could have focused on language instruction or soft skills development, but you chose STEM material. Why did you choose to concentrate on STEM in particular?

DA: I think I chose it for several reasons. First, I think STEM is more meritocratic than other fields, and you can achieve more by--I don't have any evidence, but it feels like in politics or finance, you have to have a lot of personal connections and men are helping men, all of these games and stuff like that. But I think in STEM, if you're good, it doesn't matter for your boss, or for your company if you're a woman or a man.

And now, the thing is that there is a lot of demand in this field so people can get jobs. Girls can get jobs, and also it pays better than many other fields. And it's also fairly easy to teach tech skills. You can go through a boot camp, very short courses, or for the girls that we train it takes 3 months. They can get some freelance job after a 3 month course, so it's very quick. We can see quick results, and they can see quick results, and it feels very empowering. However, in other fields, I think it takes a longer time to build this foundational knowledge that you can apply to your career.

JIA: How did you go about designing the curriculum? Was it mostly drawing on materials and resources that you already had, or did it require a great deal of research, especially to get the level appropriate? Presumably you were interested primarily in working with girls and young women who had limited experience.

DA: Yes. So our program is centered on project-based learning, so that in the end they have to create a project, they have to pitch it, and they have to apply for different competitions. And I think it's very good...