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Female solidarity in order to prevent exclusion of old women from digital society Print E-mail
Monday, 28 July 2014 00:00

WiTEC Athens smallGroupPhotoThe two years European Project 'How young technological women can do network with women 50+ (ΤΥΝΕΤ 50+)' was fulfilled with success. The difficulties of old people and especially of old women to get familiar with new communication technologies (e-mail, internet, skype, facebook, mobile phones etc) are studied through this project. These could be on one hand because they do not have the necessary technological background and on the other hand because they don’t feel easy with technology or they don’t have easy access due to prejudices and stereotypes. Greek Women's Engineering Association (EDEM) was the project partner from Greece and organized all the activities took place in Greece with coordinator the General Secretary of EDEM, Nadia Chrisicopoulou. 

TYNET logoAim of the project, which took place in 7 European countries, by the European network WiTEC (www.witec-eu.net), is to build in each country a group of young women, with the technological knowhow, who, during the project, will be skilled with additional abilities a) to teach women 50+ who belong to special groups: they do not have access to new technologies, they are poor, they are not educated, they are ‘social excluded’ (minorities, emigrants etc.) b) to transfer they necessary knowledge in a simple way in order that women 50+ can develop the basic skills to use new technologies.

The project was structured according four thematic Workshops, with the participation of partners’ representatives and of women –young ones with technological specialization and older ones without any technological skills.

  • The first Workshop took place in Barcelona in September 2012 and it was devoted to plan the actions of the projects.
  • The second Workshop took place in Bastad in Sweden in April 2013 with subject: What can ICT do for me? The design of an on-line toolkit to be used by women 50+ and the ways to train them, how to use It, was discussed during this workshop.
  • EDEM undertook the organization of the third workshop with subject ‘Mentoring and training competencies for young women-Sharing of experience and good practices for young women’, 26-27 September 2014, in Athens. This workshop had great interest because the participants were divided into three groups and discussed the tools and method for approaching women a) emigrants, b) unemployed high educated and c) unemployed basic educated. Due to the fact that this workshop took place in Athens, there were also female students of the National Technical University of Athens participating in the workgroups.
  • The 4th Workshop took place in Bologna, in April 2014. It was devoted to process the online guide for the intergenerational communication and training but also some alternative tools for communication, networking and training were presented.

LLL logoEDEM also organized a pilot two weeks’ seminar (June 2014) addressing to women 50+ who hadn’t any knowledge and skills to use new technologies. The young female engineers and students of Technical Universities who had attended one or more workshops were the trainers-mentors of the women 50+. This seminar showed that with special/personal interventions all -men and women- can benefit from new technologies and open up their horizons.