eHealth Africa committed to building stronger health systems in Nigeria— Director

The Executive Director, eHealth Africa, Juliet Odogwu, said this in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.

Odogwu said that the organization had been able to train over 200 males and females in technology and software-related skills at different stages of its programmes.

“As an organization, eHA has more women at its senior management level and it’s working to see a balance in the ratio of women to men at all levels of its workforce.

“To achieve this, the leadership of the organization designed some early career programmes to help young female graduates start and build their careers.

“We noticed that in the technology sector specifically, we have very few females, who are willing to develop the skills or even get jobs in the technology sector because it is seen as a male-dominated field.

“We have equally realized that obviously women are entering into the workforce in different capacities and technology should not be any different.

“We want to build that culture in Nigeria and even in northern Nigeria to be specific to encourage women to see these as vibrant opportunities for them in the long run.

“We want to build the immediate capacity in the environment so we need to be able to see in the next one to two years the number of women in the technology sector increase by at least 30 percent in the communities where we work,’’ she said.

According to her, one of such initiatives is an all-women cohort of the eHA Academy geared towards helping young women start their careers in software and web development.

She said there was also an all-female paid ”internship cohort” that exposes graduates to the organization’s values, mission and better prepares them for full-time employment opportunities.

“We will continue our efforts to make eHealth Africa the best place to work and our mission is to build stronger health systems in Africa”.

She further said that the organization was recently certified as one of the best places to work in Nigeria for 2022 by an international organization called “Best Places to Work’’.

Odogwu said that the recognition gave the management the drive and motivation to keep raising the bar.