Hi Carly :) 

Welcome to WILDLABS!

I curated some great opportunities for young East African women looking to get into conservation technology some time ago. Though you are based in the U.S, there are some great resources on there that may be of interest to you like - Earth Data Science: Earth Lab provides free online courses, tutorials, tools and course materials covering topics including data integration, GIS and data intensive science. You can also check out WILDLABS Tech Tutors to learn more about the areas within conservation technology and which you'd be most interested in pursuing. Also, feel free to come along to WILDLABS Variety Hour, our monthly community event connecting you to the exciting projects, research, and ideas that are happening in conservation tech right now.

As an East African woman in the field of Conservation Technology, what resources have been the most useful for you? | WILDLABS

Hello Wildlabbers!Are you an East African woman starting or advancing your career in the field of Conservation Technology? What resources have been the most helpful along your journey that you would love to share with other upcoming young women in this field? Or perhaps you undertake work to advance the role of women across East Africa within Conservation Technology? What resources do you offer and how do they prove useful for these women? We'd love for you to share along this thread all the great resources (academic, training, funding, mentoring, upskilling, etc.) that you think can help support the East African women in Conservation Technology within our community and guide them in unlocking the opportunities available to them towards realising their full potential in this field. To get you started, here are a few notable mentions:Programs:The Women in Conservation Technology Programme -  a months-long program that seeks to equip early career women with foundational knowledge in conservation technology through exploring technological solutions to overcome conservation challenges in order to advance their careers in conservation. WE Africa Leadership Program - WE lead is a Women for the Environment Africa program that is a year long leadership experience for a cohort of 20 women environmental leaders in Africa each year. It includes tailored trainings, facilitated dialogues, one-on-one coaching and mentoring, community building, peer support, and increased visibility focused around the 5 pillars of personal leadership, wellbeing, relationship and collaboration, visibility for impact and radical imagination. Women in the Field (WIF) Program - a Grumeti Fund’s RISE (Research and Innovation for the Serengeti Ecosystem) three-week skills-based intensive for talented Tanzanian women in the conservation sector, hosted out of the newly constructed RISE center, in which they focus on both the theory and practice of social and ecological data collection. Microsoft Africa Development Centre (ADC) Women Empowerment Program - The ADC is Microsoft's first-ever engineering offices in Africa with locations in Nairobi, Kenya running a 12-week program aimed at developing and preparing women and girls with career readiness tips, tech skills on specific tech tracks per cohort, mentorship and encouraging women to take up leadership positions and go for opportunities in their careers and education as part of their growth and contribution to society.The Standard Chartered Women in Technology Incubator Kenya - Africa’s leading incubator programme for female founded businesses, aligning with calls for more diversity in technology, entrepreneurship and for more opportunities for women to develop entrepreneurial and leadership excellence. The program is an initiative of Standard Chartered in partnership with @iBizAfrica Centre, Strathmore University.Communities & Platforms:Women in Conservation Tech Programme (WiCT) WILDLABS Group - a space for the women and mentors involved in the WiCT programme to keep in touch, share updates and resources, and problem solve together. African Women in GIS - a community made up of African women around the world who study, work, or are interested in the Geospatial industry. Women in Machine Learning & Data Science: Kenya Chapter and Uganda Chapter - supports and promotes women and gender minorities who are practicing, studying or are interested in the fields of machine learning and data science.Women in Data Science Kenya (WiDS) - an initiative aimed to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and to support women in the field.Zindi Africa - hosts the largest community of African data scientists, working to solve the world’s most pressing challenges using machine learning and AI. They connect data scientists with organisations, and provide a place to learn, hone your skills and find a job.ConTech Africa - a female-led, Tanzania-based and owned consultancy firm specialising in conservation technology services. Rwanda Biodiversity Information System - an open web-based portal to overcome the constraint of Biodiversity data inaccessibility. Share along this thread the resources you think would be useful for our East African female community!

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You can also check out this webinar on the future of green jobs to help you get started. 

The Future of Green Jobs

The explosion of climate startups, corporate initiatives, government funding, and non-profit action, coupled with recent layoffs, has led to a pivotal moment where opportunity meets demand. The talent is there and the market is ready.

Worth

I hope these resources help as a starting point! Best wishes.  

Hi Carly!

It's exciting to hear that you're thinking about how to apply your skills to conservation! I made a career pivot last year from an electrical engineer at the department of defense to a PhD student designing community-driven environmental sensors and its been awesome! Definitely took some work to figure out what I wanted though.

Good places to start might be joining the AI for Conservation Slack group (it has a jobs page) and potentially the Work on Climate community. In my experience people in these communities are generally very happy to give advice to someone pivoting into the field. 

If you are considering the academic route, you should think about whether you want a Master's or PhD (or something else). It might be hard to find a Master's program specifically for software + animals, but some HCI programs might have tracks that allow you to work with animals, for example with Georgia Tech's Animal-Computer Interaction Lab. If you're open to a PhD, I would recommend exploring the existing academic literature for papers that seem interesting and then looking more into the authors.

I'd be happy to talk more if there's other advice I can provide. Good luck!

Hi! Great to meet another Carly :) 

You might also want to look through the Conservation Tech Directory, which has lots of job boards & academic labs plus a huge number of organizations, companies, tools, etc. that you could peruse to help narrow down your search or strategize your career change.

Hi Carly,

I'm asking myself the same questions. I've recently contributed to MoveApps, which was a very nice entry point into conservation tech/movement ecology for me. Perhaps you find it interesting, too. There's a nice article on it here on WILDLABS. Let me know if you have any questions on this.

Cheers,

Alex