“The world needs women to be equal partners in AI.”
Championing diversity and inclusion.
Dr. Ayesha Khanna is Founder of 21st Century Girls, a registered charity that teaches coding, artificial intelligence and robotics to girls and women. Dr. Khanna is a passionate advocate of gender parity and diversity in tech and artificial intelligence.
Ayesha was featured in the Singapore government’s campaign to promote girls in tech education, and was named one of Singapore’s 100 Women in Technology.
21st Century Girls is a founding partner in two prominent programs in Singapore: Code in the Community and Empower: AI for Singapore that teach coding and artificial intelligence in Singapore. In 2023, the charity is launching new programs in Generative AI, the Metaverse and Robotics.
“We are grateful to our partners like Google, PayPal, Visa and Infocomm Media Authority for their partnership in educating girls in tech.”
— Dr. Ayesha Khanna
Empower: AI for Girls
Learn the basics of AI techniques, coding and deploying ML, connecting problems to AI solutions, and the ethics of AI
Empower: AI for Girls program was launched in October 2018 in partnership with Ngee Ann Polytechnic. The 10-week course (3 hours every Saturday) introduces girls to the basics of AI techniques (supervised learning, unsupervised learning), coding and deploying ML models in Python, connecting business problems to AI solutions, and the ethics of AI.
The program was well received by girls at Ngee Ann Polytechnic and was expanded to allow girls from all five polytechnics in Singapore to participate. The program has run over 6 times and taught almost 200 students in Singapore. 21st Century Girls continues to work with the Polytechnic leadership to scale further and develop the Empower course.
Code in the Community
Learn to Code: For Ages 8-16 yrs
Code In The Community (CITC) is Singapore’s largest program providing free coding classes to get children from disadvantaged backgrounds interested in coding. Launched in 2017, it offers free, multi-level Scratch & Python classes for kids 8-16 years old.
A six-year initiative, CITC has taught coding to thousands of children in Singapore. 21st Century Girls has been the lead charity supporting this program, funded by Google and the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore, taught by Saturday Kids.
We are grateful for the support from Singapore’s four self-help groups the Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC), The Eurasian Association, Singapore (EA), Singapore Indian Development Association (SINDA) and Yayasan MENDAKI (MENDAKI).
Coming up: Generative AI for Girls
Education happens within the context of a larger community. Our approach extends beyond the school to help ensure students have the necessary support to do their best learning.
