Published: 4 December 2013
Region: Latin America
“Let’s go girls!” says Marianna Santos, the founder of “Chicas Poderosas” (“Powerful Women”), urging women in media to learn how to use technology in order make their news stories more appealing and interactive.
“Chicas Poderosas” is a movement travelling around Latin America, which aims to empower women by providing them training in technology fields, related to media, such as animated or simple data visualisation, data mining and visual storytelling.
As data and investigative journalism grows bigger in South America, the need for these skills will soon emerge. Chicas Poderosas set as goal to create a corps of tech-savvy women in Latin American, who will be ready to respond to upcoming challenges of new media and to lead the changes and innovation in the media newsrooms.
Mariana Santos explains that through this project she wants to provide women in Latin America with more opportunities to get into News and New Technologies field.
One of the reasons she has launched the project is to share her personal success story of being the only woman in the Guardian Interactive Team in London and thus to inspire other women to chase their dreams. In her article for Rising Voices, she writes: “I feel that we, women, especially among the Latin world are the first ones to cut our own wings and not allow ourselves to dream too high and to honestly believe we can reach far in our careers” while she concludes that “I believe we need to be the first ones to believe in ourselves”.
Since its beginning, “Chicas Poderosas” has successfully reached Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica organizing events and workshops with the support of journalists, designers and programmers. In Chile, 150 people ignored the rain and the cold to attend the workshops while in Colombia more than 400 attendees have gathered with 200 followers via live stream, reports IJNet.
Santos plans to expand the project to Argentina, Mexico and Brazil and create a strong network in the region where people can share ideas and knowledge.
