Erwin Wills (c), an expert from the E-Governance Ministry, with students at the drone booth at Oak Ridge on Monday
by Orlando Pulido (Freelance Writer)
SANTA ELENA TOWN, Cayo District, Wed. May 7, 2025
To mark International Girls in ICT Day 2025, the Ministry of E-Governance, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST), hosted its third annual summit under the empowering hashtag, #LeadLikeAGirl. The event took place on May 5, 2025, at the Oak Ridge Venue in Spanish Lookout, bringing together young women, educators, and industry leaders to inspire and promote female participation in technology and innovation.
Group photo of educators/industry leaders with over one hundred high school-aged girls from around Belize
“What the Ministry has done, the Ministry of Education, specifically, under the Science and Technology Unit, is to bring over 100 girls from across the country … and really, what we want to do is, we want to expose our young students to the whole business, to the whole field of, you know, technology, and how they can use technology in the classroom to improve their education, to create new resources; and really, how technology can help them to be able to start to think about future careers in education using technology,” said the Hon. Oscar Requena, Minister of Education, Science and Technology, who was present for the summit.
Erwin Wills (l), an expert from E-Governance along with Hon. Oscar Requena (c), Minister of Education, Science and Technology at the Oak Ridge Venue in Spanish Lookout on Monday.
During the sessions on Monday, the 100 girls from 25 different high schools learned coding skills at the basic level, and were moved to an advanced level. They also took part in a drone activity to expose them to different areas of technology.
But the star of the show was Stephanie Sylvestre, who gave an inspirational talk to the girls. Sylvestre, a graduate of Saint Catherine Academy (1988 class), told the girls that what is needed in coding is resiliency, resourcefulness, and creativity. Sylvestre told the girls that when code is written, “… you need to look around, get some help, and come back and do it again.”
Stephanie Sylvestre from Avatar Buddy is now assisting the Ministry of Education with AI, using a proprietary small language model.
“So, we have created Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for the Ministry of Education under Access 501, which allows Belizeans, and anybody who goes to Access 501, to be able to search the archive and get simple language results; and what we’ve done is, we call our AI agents, buddies. But we have three buddies to date that we have configured. One is a 501 teacher assistant to help the teacher with their lesson plan; and one is a 501 historian, so that’s configured to be an archivist to be able to pull back information that an archivist would; and then the third one is a Creole 501 historian, where that’s designed to bring back the data, and it not only speaks in English, it speaks in Creole automatically as well,” the Harvard graduate told Amandala.
Namrita Balani, the Director of Science and Technology within the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology
As the summit of girls ended in Spanish Lookout on Monday, they will go on to influence other girls. So far, that number has gone to 500, says Namrita Balani, Director of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. In a world of the digital age, the future is bright.
As explained by Dr. Adriani Coleman from the E-Governance Ministry, much is happening on that front.
“We are working on the major platforms to set the foundation for the full digital transformation of Belize. Right now, we are working on the Civil Registry, the Vital Statistics Unit digitization. We are also working on the criminal records digitization. We have launched the I Declare, which is for Immigration and Customs use,” she said.
The plan for the future is to involve other stakeholders in the digital summit. Rakayla Ruwter, a student who ranked prominently in coding on Monday, has a special message for her young colleagues: “Try, try, and try again.”
(AMANDALA Ed. Note: ICT – Information and Communications Technology)
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