State Secretary in the Ministry of Trade, Tourism, and Telecommunications Tatjana Matić has said that the retraining and additional training programmes for women in ICT one of the significant measures of the Strategy of Development of the IT Industry for developing the staff in that sector.

When handing over the decisions to the candidates for the retraining programme implemented by the Citizen Association “Local self-organisation”, in cooperation with the municipality of Savski venav, State Secretary has underlined that it is one of nine projects supported in the competition of the Ministry of Trade, Tourism, and Telecommunications.

“These projects, for which 14.800.000 RSD in total have been allocated, also which contribute to the economic empowerment of women and encouragement of gender equality in the ICT sector, where here, as well as in Europe, there is only 20 per cent of women”, said Ms Matić, stating that first cycle of these programmes will train 220 IT ladies, and that the platform is planned to expand.

In the congress hall of the municipality of Savski venac, the candidates were welcomed by the president of that municipality and the chair of the Council for Gender Equality of the City of Belgrade, Irena Vujović.

In the project of the Association “Local Self-organisation” 345 interested women applied, out of whom 160 candidates were selected for taking the initial training test. The largest number of candidates is 37 up to 47 years of age. The programme takes six months and contains PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS trainings.