Education and post-traumatic recovery for women from Artsakh

As a result of the military offensive launched by Azerbaijan in Artsakh in 2023, almost the entire population of the republic was forced to flee to Armenia, and tens of thousands of people became refugees. To help and support at least some of them, DataArt’s Armenian office launched a free quality assurance (QA) IT school for women from Artsakh. According to participants, the three months of intense education with top specialists resulted not only in acquiring new professions but also had a strong therapeutic effect. Education provided a much-needed sense of control over their lives and faith in a better future. Three of these students and the head of DataArt Armenia share more about this exceptional experience.

Ishkhan Margaryan, deputy head of DataArt Armenia, Human Resources department

In our office, we strive to develop our employees’ public speaking and training skills while positively impacting the IT community in Armenia. So, we have already organized several free IT schools here.

When the war in Artsakh broke out, and the locals had to leave their homes and move to Yerevan, we realized that this was the right moment to organize another IT school, this time with a significant emphasis on corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the vulnerable group of displaced people. We immediately realized that the project should be aimed specifically at women, because there are generally fewer women than men in IT, and we would like to give them a boost. We hoped that this project could help break stereotypes related to women in engineering.

At first, we were afraid that we would be very slow in recruiting the group, because it had not been a month since the war, and people were under a lot of stress; we thought they might not be in the mood for education. I asked the whole team to spread the information through all corporate and personal channels. Plus, we contacted several companies that were in the process of relocating people from Artsakh to Armenia.