Shopify, the global e-commerce software company headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, is expanding its partnership with Technovation, a global tech education nonprofit. The partnership started Shopify more than six years ago, originally to help young Canadian women become tech leaders in their communities. Shopify is now expanding the collaboration to the U.S., Ireland, Germany and Brazil.
Technovation helps young women – age 10 to 18 – in more than 100 countries develop greater self-efficacy and shift their attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics, including girls from low-income and underrepresented communities. Every year, participants identify a real-world problem in their community, from climate change to medical access at refugee camps, and are challenged to solve it by developing a mobile app with the support of mentors. More than 9,000 apps and artificial intelligence prototypes have been created by the program participants to date.
In Canada, Shopify has already provided over 1,500 hours of mentorship, hosted more than 100 events and supported over 4,000 girls. The new global partnership aims to engage more than 2,000 new participants in the program, in addition to 400+ girls in Canada. Beyond that, Shopify employees around the world have the opportunity to give back to under-resourced communities through skills-based volunteering. Shopify also plans to double its engineering team in 2021 by hiring 2,021 new technical roles.
