bold idea
Increase economic empowerment for Indigenous women of low-income households by teaching them programming to qualify for jobs in the technology sector.
organization overview
Chaka reduces poverty for women ages seventeen to twenty-five-years-old from northwest Argentina’s low-income neighborhoods of Tucumán by taking them out of their vulnerable situations. Chaka offers programming courses and mentoring for English speaking, job searches, and entrepreneurship. These programs are designed with key pedagogical partners to guarantee course completion and to bring the women into the competitive programming market. Argentina has offered 12 unicorns — high growth startups — to the world. Chaka dreams that the next technological unicorn in the country will be founded and led by a female chief executive officer from a low-income neighborhood in Tucuman.
Personal Bio
Inés Palacios is from Tucumán, Argentina. Her Indigenous ancestry allows her to understand the barriers that Indigenous women face. Inés experienced gender-based economic violence within her family, which led her to become a feminist activist. As a civil servant, she led the first Gender Mainstreaming Plan in the Province of Buenos Aires, which impacted two million women. Inés has won numerous scholarships, including the Di Tella University Scholarship, the U.S. International Leadership Program, and Obama Scholars at Columbia University. She was a finalist at the Social Business Creation competition in Canada for her work with “Chaka Cultural,” an incubator project for Indigenous women that she co-leads. In 2022, Inés accompanied President Barack Obama on the Daily Show. Inés also coordinates a coding scholarship program for 1,200 youth in her hometown. She is creating a program to reduce poverty and teach programming to Indigenous women from low-income neighborhoods to guarantee them job opportunities in the technology sector, where they are currently scarcely represented.
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