The three-day course, attended by more than 30 women from the Western Balkans, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, includes a mentoring programme for women involved in national and international cybersecurity policy-making processes and international negotiations. The training provides targeted cyber capacity-building activities for women, with the objective of ensuring that female trainees – future managers and leaders – are equipped with comprehensive knowledge of cybersecurity.

Ambassador Tadej Rupel, member of the Steering Committee of the WB3C and the National Coordinator for External Aspects of Digitalisation, AI & Cyber Security, addressed the participants. He emphasised that the training programme for female participants is an important part of the efforts towards capacity building in the field of cybersecurity as well as an initiative that enables female individuals, communities and governments to benefit from the potential of the expert knowledge.

Slovenia joined the Her CyberTracks initiative, with the aim of promoting the representation and participation of women in ICT, in May 2023, when it signed, together with France and Montenegro, a joint declaration of cooperation between the WB3C and ITU, a specialised UN agency.

The inclusion of the Her CyberTracks project in the activities of the WB3C is, among other things, in line with the feminist agenda of the Slovenian foreign policy, with the aim of fostering the equal, full and meaningful representation of both genders in the creation and implementation of international policies in the field of cybersecurity.

This year, the WB3C is planning three additional training sessions for Western Balkan experts at judicial and police academies, as well as cyber resilience training for critical infrastructure managers.