Costa Rica
Increasing Female Participation in IT
Under the terms of the most recent Central American Free Trade Agreement
(CAFTA) negotiations, Costa Rica has agreed to focus on key telecommunications-related
areas and one National UN Volunteer (NUNV) is working to see this
through. The NUNV, who began his assignment in October 2003, is spending
one year promoting the . Cisco
currently has 1837 students and 55 instructors in fourteen academies
across the country. One important goal of the NUNV, who serves as
the Academy Support Representative for Central, North, South America
and the Caribbean (CANSAC), is to increase female participation in
Costa Rica’s IT sector from ten to twenty percent. To achieve
this, he and his colleagues are applying strategies such as the use
of focus groups, all-female classes and female instructors. Recently,
he and his colleagues started the first 100 percent female class.
The Volunteer has also undertaken an initiative to introduce additional
IT skills such as CCNP and wireless and security technologies.
