Princess A.

Princess A.

2018 Anita Borg Systers Pass It On Award Winner
Project Title: STEM WOW Extended

Princess is a social entrepreneur who is currently pursuing her degree in mathematics at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky on the Lincoln Scholars Program. She is the founder and director of Kids and Math Organization, a nonprofit which seeks to help basic school kids realize and appreciate the versatility of Mathematics. She has volunteered at American Field Service-Ghana and was a participant in Project iSWEST 2014, organized by Nsesa Foundation. She was also a participant in the Young African Women’s Congress 2016.

Princess won the Ghana Youth Social Entrepreneurship Competition 2017, organized by Ghana Think Foundation in partnership with Digital Opportunity Trust-Canada. She has been featured in the book “Mindshift” by award-winning author Dr. Barbara Oakley. She is interested in music, sign language, and is currently learning African drum rhythms.

Princess is Project Lead for STEM WOW (STEM Woman Of the Week), a program by Nsesa Foundation which seeks to tell powerful stories of young inspirational African women in STEM to inspire the next generation of female African innovators, scientists, and engineers. So far, the stories of STEM WOW have reached over 100,000 girls and women via Facebook in two months (February and March 2018). STEM WOW runs until the end of June and will celebrate 20 STEW WOW stories in total. The STEM WOW Extended project seeks to reach more girls as well as give them the opportunity to engage actively with these stories.

Princess plans to run the STEM WOW Extended project, which is comprised of two parts. The first part, the STEM WOW Essay Competition, will encourage girls to reflect on these powerful STEM WOW stories and how they impacted them. The top five winners will receive full scholarships to take part in Nsesa Foundation’s Project iSWEST, a three-week intensive innovation boot camp in Ghana which will run in July 2018. At Project iSWEST, the girls will receive hands-on training in computer and Arduino programming, and will be receive help from mentors to develop solutions to real-life problems.

The second part of STEM WOW Extended, STEM WOW Chronicles, will run from July through December 2018. It seeks to expand the reach of STEM WOW beyond the confines of social media, as many young girls are not on social media due to Facebook’s age limit and/or the restrictions that boarding schools place on internet use. The STEM WOW stories will therefore be published as a book and distributed to these girls in the Ghanaian community who have internet access restrictions.