Baratang Miya is a South African-based visionary and award winning tech social entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of Girlhype coding academy for women and girls in underserved communities in South Africa. She is passionate about Workforce Diversity and workplace Inclusion of Women and Youth in the Technology and Entrepreneurship space, as a result she started, Women In Tech Academy and Girlhype with focus to attract, promote and develop women and girls from underrepresented groups in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Miya says that girls should consider careers in the tech world because there’s a lack of women’s voices in those fields. At Girlhype, she finds funding and partners for the organization, including human resources managers who help students find jobs when they finish training. Over the years, Baratang has deepened her knowledge and understanding of tech ecosystems which saw her managing CiTi’s Bandwidth Barn located in Khayelitsha. She has also worked closely with BlackBerry’s AppsLab in Cape Town, and managed the City of Cape Town’s SmartCity content development strategy.
Baratang was named as one of the top 3 nominees for the 2016 MTN Women In ICT Community Builder Award. The US State Department has also recognized her commitment to women and girls in STEM, and invited her to spend six weeks in Silicon Valley with other Tech Women award recipients. Baratang has just been chosen for the 2017 ITS Global Policy Fellowship taking place in Brazil, where she will have an opportunity to work with key stakeholders and government officials. She has partnered with organisations like UN Women, Mozilla, TechWomen, SiliconCape and Technovation to develop women’s digital literacy and participating on the web.
The most rewarding part of her job, she says, is seeing girls and women who grew up in shacks complete their Girlhype training, get jobs and move into the middle class. She advises young girls to focus, saying that as a girl she spent all her time reading and dreaming about where she wanted to be in the future.