News

This term, students at Marianville Secondary School are spending six weeks with NiuPay staff, talking about leadership, staying safe online and careers in technology. The Sister Angela Taylor Leadership and ICT Program is a partnership between NiuPay and the school, and it has quickly become one of the highlights of our year.

The programme is named in honour of Sister Angela Taylor, recognising the service, dignity and quiet strength that have shaped generations of Papua New Guinean women. It began at the school’s 60th anniversary celebrations in May, grew after Marianville students visited our stand at the Digital Transformation Summit in July, and got under way in August.

Six weeks, six themes

Each week, a group of NiuPay staff spends time with the students, and every session ends with something concrete for them to take away. The weeks cover:

• Leading from within: self-leadership, identity and values, online and offline.
• Digital citizenship.
• Cybersecurity and digital identity.
• Purposeful content creation.
• Careers in the digital economy, with a focus on women in ICT, closing with “My next step”: one goal for the year and the single action each student will take towards it.
• A final week in which the students design a digital idea of their own to help their school or community, then graduate.

Why we’re part of it

We’d love to see many more of Papua New Guinea’s young women in technology, and some of them working with us one day. Every project we deliver depends on people with the skills and confidence to use what has been built, and those people start out exactly where these students are now.

Speaking to EMTV, our Chief Operating Officer, Trevor Manokore, encouraged the students to start now: so much learning is freely available that they can begin building skills today, with or without a formal qualification.

Thank you to Deputy Principal Mrs Hape and the Marianville teaching staff, and to EMTV for sharing the story. We can’t wait to see what the students design in their final week.