Bridging the Gender Gap – ACE Impact Champions Women, Girls Education, and Leadership

Having more females empowered through the acquisition of higher education degrees and relevant skills has been a key focus of the ACE Impact project. Female enrolment and involvement in the higher education sector, particularly in STEM subjects, has generally been low, with stakeholders being called upon to invest efforts to ensure that the pipeline of women in higher education as students, administrators, researchers, and leaders increases in proportion to the population of women in Africa.

ACE Impact is strategically responding to this call, by highlighting female enrolment as a key disbursement linked indicator in a bid to encourage all centers to prioritise female student enrolment in their centers. Current figures show that the project is making some remarkable progress in closing the gender gap in higher education. For the period January 2019 – December 2020, the number of females enrolled in ACE Impact Centers stood at 3,333, representing 31% of the overall target of enrolling 10,707 females during the project’s life cycle.

The project is advocating and calling on all centers to continue pursuing the set target, strategising new innovative ways to attract more female candidates into their centers until the gender is well and truly closed.

Within higher education, a key area where women are significantly underrepresented is in positions of leadership. With the month of March being dedicated to the celebration of Women (8^th March being International Women’s Day), we focus our attention on one of our female center leaders who is serving as a key role model to young female students and faculty across Africa.