Digital Marketing Skill Institute (DMSI) in partnership with Challenge Fund for Youth Empowerment has launched the Digital Marketing Women Employability and Entrepreneurship Programme (DM-WEEP) geared toward empowering unemployed young women within 20 to35 years.
Tobi Asehinde, the chief executive officer/founder of DMSI explained that the initiative will afford beneficiaries the opportunity to become either a social media manager and advertising specialist or a WordPress website development and search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist.
“It has been an all-time goal of ours to see a world where women are safe, empowered and there are no gender or social class barriers, and what better way than to create that world by ourselves?
“ Therefore, in line with our organizational vision of empowering and helping 1 million people by 2030 to start, grow and scale wildly profitable businesses and careers using digital marketing across the globe, DM-WEEP, an initiative we launched in 2021 post-Covid, has empowered about 1000+ unemployed Nigerian Women already and still thriving.
“We cannot save everybody but we are doing our best to empower as many women as possible through this training and they in turn can empower others. That’s the cycle we hope to create,” Asehinde said.
Christiana Olawumi, the project manager at DM-WEEP in her speech encouraged beneficiaries to join hands in spreading the good news and in creating the needed awareness about the initiative.
“Our organisation believes in partnership and as such, people can also encourage young women around them, their wives, sisters or friends to acquire these life-changing skills. So far, we have trained over 1000 women and we have a goal of training 5000 women before 2024,” she said.
DMSI founded in 2017 has been a leading organisation in using digital technologies to accelerate the development of digital marketing talents and match them with companies globally either as employees or entrepreneurs (freelancers or agencies) using artificial intelligence (AI).
It is tailored to empower women with digital marketing skills and matches them to high-paying jobs with access to mentorship, and career services and to also secure a better future and job security through decent jobs in the new digital economy. It is breaking gender biases and stereotypes by giving women a voice in a male-dominated digital marketing industry.
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Alarming statistics of the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that one in three women would be subjected to either physical or sexual intimate partner violence, or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.
The 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (2018 NDHS) further showed that 30 percent of females between 15 and 49 years had experienced sexual violence. During the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, cases of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) soared.
Advocates of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) have identified that one major reason many women stay in abusive situations, especially by their partners is that they lack the means to cater to themselves.
Data from the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show that about 40 percent of Nigerian Youth are unemployed, with women being the larger percentage.
With respect to these statistics, the initiative is not limited to a specific social class and as such caters to women from all backgrounds who are unemployed and interested in developing skills that can enable them to create a successful career or business in Digital Marketing.
DM-WEEP offers courses designed for the students to get practical knowledge in digital marketing through a 2-week intensive online training which also enables beneficiaries to build a professional portfolio from the assignments during the course.
Testimonials from some of the beneficiaries reflected the impact of this initiative, especially in empowering them and making them more exposed to opportunities.
According to Anulika Nwaiku, a beneficiary of DM-WEEP, “The programme boosted my confidence and gave me in-depth knowledge of digital marketing and I have also gotten a job upon completion of the training.”
For Mosiko Remilekun, another beneficiary of the programme, the training in digital marketing helped her get another much-needed stream of income, having added it to her skill set.
Olajumoke Bello who lost her job due to the COVID-19 Pandemic also got a job off of one of DMSI’s job matching platforms- Accredital, having completed the training from DM-WEEP.
