From robots to girl power, getting Cameroon's women into work

YAOUNDE – With a flash of green light, a robot sputters and whizzes across the room, obeying the remote control commands 15-year-old Xaviera Nguefo and her team send its way. It is a scene that would not look out of place in a futuristic sci-fi fantasy, but is instead playing out in Yaounde, the dusty capital of Cameroon with its potholed streets and frequent power outages. In a country where 1 in 4 girls do not even learn to read, Xaviera, one of about 20 young Cameroonians studying at the NextGen Technology Center in Yaounde, is picking up the basics of artificial intelligence. "I love doing that because the physics that they teach us (at school) is all applied here," she said. "And it makes me a little bit smarter!"