You, yes you reading this have probably heard Monique's name over the last past days. You may have heard that she is the first winner of the VISA Everywhere Initiative: Women's Global Edition - Social Impact Challenge. Her NGO, Green Girl's Organisation bagged home the $100,000 cash prize.
I had the pleasure of meeting Monique, I believe, 2 years ago. She was invited to speak about her NGO and what it does. I sat at the back of the hall and watched with a smile on my face and my eyes shining in awe as a frail, bespectacled young woman spoke with confidence and a voice that did not match her stature. As she flipped through the slides that were projected on the wall of the conference room, you could hear the passion in her voice and see how much she wanted to make young women a major piece of what she was out to accomplish when she started her organisation in 2015.
Monique is no stranger to rewards. She has picked up quite a number of them over the last few years. In 2017 already, she had won another high-profile one, the inaugural WWF African Youth Champion Award. She also won the WWF International President's Award on June 14, 2019, becoming the first African Female to do so.
Perhaps, what the most remarkable thing she has been able to do with her organisation is to get young ladies actively involved in STEM - Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For those who have watched the movie "Hidden Figures," you may remember that the central theme of the movie was to show how three black women were able to push through gender and racial stereotypes to excel in their field, notably in mathematics and computer engineering. You may think that in Cameroon, we are not living in 1960s segregated America or that if you go to any of our numerous secondary schools, many girls are in the sciences.
You'll continue to believe that until you go to some less-enlightened homes where the girl child is asked to do the arts or where the boy is preferred to be schooled over the girl when income is short. If you limit yourself to Douala and Yaounde, you will be shocked at many things that you think that you think are, that are not.
That's why the singularity of what Monique does is very important. Her NGO, Green Girls' Organisation not only teaches young women to harness energy from the sun or how to transform organic waste into biogas, but it also provides employment opportunities to these young women that her NGO targets in rural communities. Over 800 women from 23 communities in Cameroon have benefited from the programme. 3000 homes have been equipped, thus, with biogas facilities and 100 with solar power equipment. A real feminist move, if you ask me.
We live in an era where the importance of STEM is increasingly being heralded; even more so for young women. There is a stark under-representation of women in these fields and whenever we come across one, people are often surprised. Think of the number of times you have come across an IT Engineer who is a woman and not for even a little second not found it a little bit odd. No, seriously, think of it.
In the movie "Black Panther" the importance of bringing young women into STEM was highlighted in Shuri, Tchalla's sister, who was the head of the tech lab of Wakanda. She engineered his suit and all the tech gadgets that he used to bring peace to Wakanda and to the world.
We have our own Shuri in the likes of Monique Ntumngia and Mbu Waindim, Cameroon's first aerospace engineer. It is important that we celebrate these women, tell their stories and use them as a flagship example for our own daughters and younger sisters who show an interest in STEM.
- Wandji Wilfred