EmpowHER

Inspiration

Black women in developing countries are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to securing quality education and even more disadvantaged when it comes to securing quality STEM education. A major cause of this is because of the very conservative nature in these communities; for instance, a girl growing up in rural Nigeria might have limited access to opportunities in STEM because her parents might be more concerned with her being a good wife and prevent her from accessing these opportunities. Another major cause is the lack of mentorship from other black women in STEM fields.

EmpowHER strives to bridge this gap between black girls in developing nations and STEM opportunities.

What it does

EmpowHER is a cross-platform application that connects black girls in developing countries to tons of opportunities, resources, mentors, and regular programming to introduce them to the world of STEM in hopes of inspiring them to venture into STEM fields.

How I built it

Due to the fact that the Ideate Hackathon is strictly about design, we used digital design and prototyping tools like Figma and Miro exclusively.

Challenges I ran into

My teammate and I had never done any design work up until Ideate and we struggled a bit to wrap our heads around all the design/prototyping toolkits and the ideation process in such a very short period of time with limited guidance,