Aprile, 2022

Nicolette Mashile wanted to find a more fulfilling career. So in 2016, she resigned from her job as a Client Service Director at a Johannesburg advertising agency. But quitting meant Nicolette was forced to stick to a stricter budget.

She began sharing her money-saving tips on YouTube and it wasn’t long before she noticed her advice resonated with African viewers. Eventually, this South African content creator built a significant following for her candid take on money management, and was invited to join the #YouTubeBlackVoices Creator Class of 2021. This in turn helped herFinancial Bunny YouTube channel garner almost 9 million views.

“I was very frank about money management, how to effectively budget and how to plan your spending. When I saw my YouTube following growing, I knew this personal finance advice was making a real impact and I committed to improving financial literacy in South Africa,” Nicolette says.

This meant finding creative ways to make financial literacy more inclusive and accessible while also removing the stigma attached to discussing personal finance. Nicolette spun her YouTube success into two books — one for adults titled “What’s Your Move,” and another for children, “Coco the Money Bunny.”

“When I created the books, I had to develop a new website so it was important to identify our different customer types and implement search engine optimization. I needed to do research to understand the target customers and develop the website to meet their needs and Google Ads was a promotional channel I experimented with,” Nicolette added.

But it was the launch of her Save or Spend board game and subsequent app that sparked her shift towards technology.

“I’d successfully leveraged digital media to share financial content, so naturally it made sense to use the power of tech to design an interactive app that could simplify money management in a fun and engaging way,” she says.

Using gamification helped to take away the seriousness around money while also addressing the lack of financial education in South Africa. In a digital era where most Africans own a smartphone rather than a laptop, Nicolette knew a free app would be an accessible tool to teach people about money. Her app has proven popular due in large part to the massive following she has built online since launching her YouTube channel back in 2017.

Nicolette’s also grown her business to include consultancy and coaching, and she relies a lot on Google Meets for some of her sessions.

“My consultancy work with brands and corporate individuals means I use video calling quite often and for this I use Google Meets. I do one-on-one coaching with multiple clients per month and it’s super simple to just send a link and jump on a call because people can log in from anywhere,” she says.

Ultimately, Nicolette hopes to continue empowering her followers by arming them with the tools and skills they need to better manage their money. “I want to keep encouraging South Africans to have the difficult discussions people often avoid around personal finance.”

Fifty-eight percent of Africa’s entrepreneurs are women. That’s why we’re empowering them with the platform and tools to grow their businesses. #LookMeUp is a call for all to #BreakTheBias. Find out more here.

Online violence against women goes beyond the internet. It impacts society and the economy at large. It leads to damaging economic repercussions, due to increased medical costs and lost income for victims. It impacts the offline world, with seven percent of women changing jobs due to online violence, and one in ten experiencing physical harm due to online threats, according to Google-supported research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2020.

That’s why the Women Techmakers program, which provides visibility, community and resources for women in technology, supports online safety education for women and allies. Google community manager Merve Isler, who lives in Turkey and leads Women Techmakers efforts in Turkey, Central Asia and the Caucasus region, organized the first-ever women’s online safety hackathon in Turkey in 2020, which expanded to a full week of trainings and ideathons in 2021. Google community manager and Women Techmakers manager Hufsa Manawar brought online safety training to Pakistan in early 2022.

Now, Women Techmakers is providing a more structured way for women around the world to learn about online safety, in the form of a free online learning module, launched in April 2022, in honor of International Women’s Day. To create this module, I worked with my co-host Alana Fromm from Jigsaw and our teams to create a series of videos covering different topics related to women’s online safety. Jigsaw is a unit within Google that explores threats to open society and builds technological solutions.

In the online training, we begin by defining online violence and walking through the ways negative actors threaten women online, which include misinformation and defamation, cyberharassment and hate speech. Regardless of the tactic, the goal remains the same: to threaten and harass women into silence. We break down the groups of people involved in online harassment and the importance of surrounding oneself with allies.

In one of the videos in the series, Women Techmakers Ambassador Esrae Abdelnaby Hassan shares her story of online abuse. She was exploring learning cybersecurity when a mentor she trusted gave her USB drives with courses and reading material that were infected with viruses and allowed him to take control of her computer and record videos. Then, he blackmailed her, using the videos he’d taken as threats. She felt afraid and isolated, and relied on her family for support as she addressed the harassment.

The learning module provides two codelabs, one on steps you can take to protect yourself online, and one on Perspective API, a free, open-source product built by Jigsaw and the Counter Abuse security team at Google. The first codelab provides practical guidance, and the second codelab walks viewers through the process of installing Perspective API, which uses machine learning to identify toxic comments.

We look forward to seeing the impact of our new, easy-to-access online training, as well as what our ambassadors are able to accomplish offline as the year progresses.