By Terry-Ann Coley-Graham
September 3, 2021
The IDB promoted the added value of private sector activity in Suriname by improving the business climate and innovation, spurring knowledge in manufacturing and high-tech technological services.
What if you were a young woman enthusiastic about a career in a field where you could find no other women? Moreover, what if you lacked the finances to easily access the education necessary to develop your skills? And what if none of this stopped you?
This is Julie Sundar’s story. The 26-year-old Surinamese trailblazer, born in Guyana, was first drawn to information and communications technology (ICT) as a teen-ager, after seeing how Artificial Intelligence was used on a television crime drama series (Person of Interest).
After her family moved to Suriname, Sundar finished high school and worked in various shops until she found the opportunity to start training in ICT. But as time passed, she felt she was not making headway, and she started wondering whether she should switch to a different career. Then she met Theo Boomsma, co-founder of IT-Core, an association of professionals that promotes ICT innovation and training in Suriname. It was while she was a volunteer to help develop a robotics engineering curriculum for children and, when he learned of her concerns, that he offered to become her mentor.
In 2014, Sundar assembled the first all-girl team for Suriname’s annual Hackathon. The team placed last in the competition. The following year, Sundar decided to recruit only males (besides her) to form a team that would compete in the country’s Internet of Things challenge, known as HackOmation.
While her team won this competition, the experience forced Sundar to confront the obstacles she would face as a woman in this field. “I had a lot of challenges working with the gentlemen,” she recalls. “I was told I should just be presenting and not getting into the tech. It was like they saw me more as someone to date rather than to be taken seriously to lead the team. So, I got really frustrated and wished there were more females in ICT.”
In 2016, Sundar tracked down the young women who had participated in the 2014 Hackathon and convinced them to once again join her to compete in the same event. They developed an augmented reality customer experience application, and this time, they placed first in the competition.
The experience led Sundar to discover her mission: to open the technology world in Surinam to women. Two years later, she created Codettes, a foundation to equip girls and young women in ICT for career success. “The reason I started Codettes was mainly because when I started in ICT, I knew nothing,” says Sundar. “I was the only female in the sector, and it was quite intimidating working with just males. But even though I had no background in ICT, I was able to accomplish a lot by just working hard and having a mentor like Theo to guide me. I wanted to share my experience with other females in ICT because I knew they felt the same way as I did.”
THE FAB ACADEMY EXPERIENCE
A decisive impulse for Sundar’s mission came in 2019. As part of the Suriname Business Climate and Innovation Program, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Suriname sought to pilot an initiative for growing knowledge in low-cost high technology manufacturing and technological services. The goal was to build on the country´s previous experience of establishing a “Fab Lab” where users access digital fabrication machines and software to develop projects.
The initiative sponsored Sundar, along with six other young people from Suriname, to participate in the 2019 Fab Academy an intensive, multidisciplinary program lasting 5 months that teaches students to conceptualize, design and prototype projects using digital fabrication tools and machines provided by MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.
Throughout the program, the seven fellows underwent rigorous training in a lab, supervised by Fab Academy founder Professor Neil Gershenfeld. Each fellow had to complete a final project, which was presented virtually to the MIT faculty at an Amazon region meeting on digital fabrication held in June 2019.
Sundar’s final Fab Academy project, “Green Tubes”, consisted of a platform that allows remote monitoring of farms in Suriname, through a machine she created with sensors, microcontrollers and a mobile app. Gershenfeld praised her project.
According to Michael Hennessey, IDB Sector Specialist in the Competitiveness, Technology, and Innovation Division, “The Fab Academy program provided a unique opportunity for the participants in Suriname to gain hands-on experience in working with digital fabrication tools, learning while building projects that were of particular interest to each of them.”
He adds, “As a result of this experience, we hope that they can continue to develop innovative projects, collaborate with other Fab Labs in the region, and transfer their knowledge and expertise locally, so that digital fabrication technologies can be a catalyst for local skills development and technology enterprises.”
Sundar, who is based Paramaribo, Surinam’s capital, is certainly of this mindset. To her, Fab Academy was an eye opener: the model allowed to run projects remotely and provided valuable experience she could pass on to those that could not afford this training. Women and young girls soon became the beneficiaries, fulfilling the mission she had set for herself.
THE FUTURE OF ICT IS FEMALE
“Everything from the Fab Academy is what we are doing now, just extended to a longer period [as her students usually start with less experience],” says Sundar. “My courses are distributed the same way– we teach the students online and have them come into the lab to do specific projects. The skills I learned from Fab Academy like 3D designing, 3D production, working with lasers and machines, and how to build a solution, is what I am teaching them.”
Theo Boomsma, her mentor, also benefitted from the Fab Academy experience, as his organization leads the lab where the fellows ran their projects. A strong supporter of Codettes, he also plans add to the country’s technological growth by scaling up his own programs, following the Fab Academy’s example.
Meanwhile, success keeps coming for the Codettes. Trainees and graduates of their Bootcamp and Inno Starter programs recently won first and second place in the 2021 Caribbean Girls Hackathon, and they are getting jobs in Internet-of-Things labs thanks to their newly-acquired skills.
Sundar is now looking to earn a bachelor’s degree while scaling up Codettes country-wide and regionally. “My mindset with them is that ‘It’s not just about winning, it’s about continuing to develop your skills and build your CV, so when applying for jobs, you can pick what’s a perfect match for you and stand out’,” she says.
For his part, Boomsma believes that Sundar has sparked a movement that is now unstoppable.
“These girls needed to be told they can do it, it’s not a guy’s thing,” he says. “And that’s essentially what she did, and she is the example of it. We now see a lot of girls moving into ICT, and that’s very beneficial to the sector.”