Securing your first job after graduation is often a challenge in one’s early career. Among many initiatives, the Delegation of the European Union to Malawi oversees various infrastructure projects that incorporate gender components, seen as additional pillars of success. As my colleague Odran Hayes will share below, these projects involve the active participation of young women at a professional level, offering them the chance to acquire valuable project management experience.
Ilaria Vanzin, Communication Coordinator at the Delegation of the European Union to Malawi and Capacity4dev Ambassador (2023-2024)
Despite some progress, women continue to be underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), facing barriers that hinder their full engagement and advancement. When it comes to infrastructure, there is no shortage of policies, but there is little in the way of tangible actions.
The EU in Malawi has recognised the need to proactively engage young women in its infrastructure programmes at a professional level. Under an initiative started in 2018, the Rural Roads Improvement Programme, young women professionals have been engaged in projects through internships with the main international consulting firm involved in the project.
Getting that first job placement after graduation is one of the most difficult challenges, especially for young women graduates. Working on large EU-funded infrastructure projects provides a great opportunity for young women, exposes them to international expertise, and greatly enhances their future employment prospects. It also contributes to sustainability by developing a core of young professionals who can manage the country’s future infrastructure investments.
We started with the Rural Roads Improvement Programme in 2018 with an agreement with the Ministry of Transport, and together with the European Investment Bank (EIB), we decided to include this approach in our blending operation (EU grant and EIB loan) for the M1 Rehabilitation project, an initiative to recover about 347km of the single carriageway M1 roads in Malawi with no changes to the existing alignment.
This year, we have again engaged young women graduates in our 4-year Malawi Energy / Wala Malawi Technical Assistance programme. The initiative is proving to be successful, and it has gained some traction with the EIB, extending it to a project in Zambia.
How does it work?
Make funds available. Engaging young women graduates was included as a requirement in the Terms of Reference (ToR) of Technical Assistance consultants and was put under Incidental Expenses: if you want positive change, you need to have funds available. In our case, we were looking at a relatively small contribution from the overall project costs.
In addition, there were practical considerations that we had to address regarding the type of employment. We decided that the young graduates would need to be formally employed with access to a taxable salary, medical coverage, insurance and pension contributions. That is difficult to do for a consulting company (i.e. the employer) that is not a registered business in the country. The solution to this problem was to outsource the payment of salaries to a local accountant at a 10% fee so that the salary is paid in local currency and pegged to the Euro.
Provide mentoring and follow-up. The consultants are tasked with providing mentoring and ensuring that the graduates are exposed to a good learning experience. They are rotated between different departments or construction sites for periods of several months. Where someone has been found to be left with little to do, the consultant promptly finds another posting.
Be flexible. The Ministry of Energy and the energy regulator asked that we include opportunities for legal and financial graduates, and while not perhaps strictly linked to STEM, we agreed to this proposal because we considered the legal and financial fields to be important aspects of infrastructure investments.
There is no requirement for the graduates to continue working for the beneficiary. In fact, we had a couple of young people who left because they found other employment in their respective fields. We consider this a success.
From our experience, it seems clear that we can make a tangible contribution to promoting STEM amongst young women at a relatively small cost. Our infrastructure projects provide an ideal opportunity to expose them to real practical work and to gain valuable experience. This should set them on a path to a successful career. All in all, to colleagues implementing similar projects, we recommend being as flexible as possible, both in terms of the availability of funds and in providing valuable opportunities and learning experiences to young graduates.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and should not be considered as representative of the European Commission’s official position.
Photo Credit: European Commission.
Comments (2)
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Women really need more and urgent technological skills training so as to close the gap between them and men in that direction such as engineering, mechanics, manufacturing, ICT, mining etc.
Could not agree more! More and more is being done globally, and projects like the one highlighted in this blog post are successfully working toward reducing that gap.