„Between 40 and 160 million women in the world will lose their jobs if they do not make the necessary transition by acquiring additional, primarily technological, knowledge and skills.“
The fourth AFA Women’s Leadership Summit is taking place on Tuesday, 15th December 2020, in a unique interactive virtual environment. The Summit is free for all who register on https://wls.afa.co.rs/ or AFA social networks. With the help of 3D technology, this year’s AFA Summit will provide visitors with the opportunity to listen to great speakers from all over the world from the comfort of their homes, explore virtual stands, walk around the Summit’s virtual premises and visit the virtual conference hall. In addition, there will be a possibility of listening to speeches and panel discussions held earlier in the day, which will allow listeners to watch the love of the AFA Summit that interests them at a time that suits them. By organizing this year’s Summit in the virtual environment, AFA organization follows the state’s health recommendations against spreading of Covid-19, but also showcases its mission of development through innovations and technology as key drivers of economic growth and social development.
The central topic of this year’s AFA Summit is “Women in the Age of Automation” with a special emphasis on skills and knowledge that women will need to adopt by 2030 in order to become mobile, tech-savvy and digitally educated, and remain competitive in the digital economy. Unfortunately, over 50% of women in Serbia will not be able to attend the Summit because they are not digitally literate (source: Eurostat 2019). The latest research by the McKinsey Global Institute warns that between 40 and 160 million women in the world will lose their jobs if they do not make the necessary transition by acquiring additional, primarily technological, knowledge and skills. Without such transition, we will only continue to witness a gender gap in income which may even increase. The expert of the McKinsey Institute, Mekala Krishnan (partner in McKinsey), will exclusively present at the Summit the changes that will take place on the labor market in the next 10 years.
The Minister of Telecommunications, Trade and Tourism Tatjana Matić, the American Ambassador to Serbia Anthony Godfrey, and the Ambassador of Australia to Serbia Ruth Stewart will give opening speeches to at the Summit. They will stress out the importance of basic digital literacy of citizens of one country, bearing in mind that in Serbia more than half of the population does not have these skills, which are necessary for functioning in the era of digitalization. They will also talk about why the challenges are greater for women and why it is urgent for women to become digitally literate.
The panel “What the future of work brings to women”, moderated by Maja Piščević, a senior research associate at the Atlantic Council of the United States, will be especially interesting. The panel will bring together great experts who will talk about the central topic of the Summit from different angles. The panelists of this panel will be Dejan Cvetković, Technology Director of the Microsoft Development Center in Serbia, John Jovanović, Director General of the Regional Office at the American International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), Tanja Miščević, Deputy Secretary General of the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC), Ingve Engstrom, Head of Cooperation of the EU Delegation to Serbia, and Zuzana Hargitai, Regional Director for the Western Balkans at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
The audience will have the opportunity to follow the presentations and discussions of as many as 50 speakers from all over the world, and the Summit will gather the largest experts from international development and financial organizations such as the World Bank, EBRD, EIB and DFC, directors of multinational companies such as IKEA, NCR, Generali, Microsoft, Rio Tinto, KPMG, Deloitte and Nutanix, as well as owners of successful international and local startups. This year, the Summit will gather a wide global community of successful women who are originally from Serbia, and who have successfully built their careers in the world’s largest corporations abroad. Some of them have even founded their own businesses, which are now great startups that operate on large developed foreign markets. Some of them, who founded their startups in the USA, are Maja Vujinović, former chief information director at General Electric, now owner of OGroup startup, Maja Strelar-Migoti, owner and director of several startups, and Ivana Cvejić, co-founder of startup Renhead.
The participation of the robot Petra from Sweden is a special curiosity, having in mind that it is the first robot in the world that can diagnose the three most common diseases of humanity. The audience will have the opportunity to see and hear this robot in the virtual environment of the Summit, but also to ask questions to the engineers who developed this robot.
The topics that this year’s Summit covers are often seen as a “distant future”, especially in Serbia, and that is exactly why it is important to attract the widest possible public attention through this Summit. The goal is to raise awareness about the importance of education, first of all in the sphere of digital and technological literacy (equally among men and women), but also about the fact that women will unfortunately be the ones who will be more negatively impacted by automatization. First, women have less free time for additional education because they are more perform almost three times more unpaid care work than men, and women are also less traditionally interested in technology. Also, women occupy more of the low value-added positions in almost all of the sectors, and these positions are easier to automate. On the other hand, this is also a great chance for women to improve their position on the labor market, if they train and retrain for future jobs over time.
The Women’s Leadership Summit is AFA’s regional flagship event established in 2017 with the idea of connecting leaders from different fields, raising awareness and working on solving important and urgent topics, jointly contributing to finding innovative solutions for economic development and society in which women will be equally involved. This year as well the last year, the Women’s Leadership Summit is held under the auspices of USAID within the broader WeFounders project, which AFA is implementing in cooperation with Impact Hub Belgrade.
AFA is a cross-sector, cross-generation and gender diversified community dedicated to economic empowerment of women and their active participation in creating future of equal opportunities, with a special focus on technology and innovation as key drivers of economic growth and social development. The most important AFA projects deal with digital literacy of women and promotion of STEM occupations among girls, so that women are equally represented in occupations of the future and in creation of digital civilization. AFA collaborates with companies, organizations, investors, institutions and the government to enable the change it advocates, because the economy and society have better results when all actors in society are equally represented in all processes.
President of Color Press Group Robert Čoban is also speaker on this AFA Women’s Leadership Summit
AFA Media relations: Vanja Kovačev 00381638455973, E mail: vanja.communications@gmail.com