LUSAKA, May 13 (Xinhua) -- Inspired to make a difference in promoting infrastructure development in the country, a young Zambian female engineer says she is determined to overcome the myth that engineering is only for men by making a meaningful contribution to the profession.

Tadalisika Zulu, a 23-year-old civil engineer, says she wants to prove that women have what it takes to venture into tough professions like engineering which society feels is only meant for men.

Zulu, a Clerk of Works at the China-funded Kenneth Kaunda International Conference Center, and an intern in the Department of Public Infrastructure in the Ministry of Infrastructure, Housing and Urban Development, said she faced resistance from male general workers at the project who could not believe that a young female could be an engineer.

"I spent two weeks on this project trying to tell the general workers that I am not a translator but an engineer. They would literally tell me, madam, there are no women engineers," she told Xinhua.

The presence of few women in the engineering profession could be seen in the number of women engineers registered under the Engineering Institute of Zambia, an institution that regulates the profession.

Only eight percent of all the registered engineers under the association are women.

And Zulu is determined to change the situation and ensure that more women take up engineering.

Zulu, who was trained at the Wuhan University of Technology in China's Hubei Province, has since set up a social media platform on Tik-Tok to talk about engineering and encourage girls and women to take up the profession.

According to her, she has so far received positive feedback, especially from girls in high school who feel that they too can also take up engineering.

"I want to inspire more women to become engineers and we need to change this mindset that women can't be engineers," she added.

When asked what prompted her to take engineering, Zulu said this was birthed when she visited her sister in Kabompo district, a small town in the northwestern part of the country.

According to her, the deplorable infrastructure she saw inspired her to take up engineering so that she should contribute to infrastructure development in the country.

She said she decided to study in China because it was the most ideal place to undertake her studies then because she was looking for a country where it would be affordable to study as a self-sponsored student.

Zulu said China offered favorable conditions and that the four years she spent in China from 2015 to 2019 have opened her up to many things.

Before doing her course in engineering, she spent her first part at Jiangxi Normal University in Nanchang City where she learned the Chinese language.

Zulu said learning the Chinese language helped her integrate at her university because she met students from different countries who spoke different languages, adding that the only mode of communication was Chinese mandarin.

She is happy with the knowledge acquired in China because she was exposed to not only theoretical aspects of the profession but practical aspects as well, a situation that has made her able to do any construction job from architectural design to the end.

She is happy with the scholarships being sponsored by China to Zambia because learning in China comes with a lot of other experiences such as learning cultures of people from other parts of the world studying in China.

Working at Kenneth Kaunda International Conference Center, the China-funded project since 2020 has added another impetus because she has been exposed to other experiences such as the Chinese culture of working as well the discipline of timekeeping.

Asked what her future plans are, Zulu says she plans to do a master's degree program in sustainable construction in engineering, which will go a long way in helping the country have infrastructure projects that were not only sustainable but environmentally friendly. Enditem

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