It is the final ceremony of a two-month-long coding boot camp for Mongolian girls, many of them from underprivileged backgrounds or nomadic families. We are in a ballroom at a five-star hotel in downtown Ulaanbaatar, and the staff is serving wine to the adults and soft drinks to the youngsters, together with finger food and pastries. The room buzzes with excitement. The girls — all clad in white T-shirts emblazoned with the hacking program’s “Girls </> Code” logo — are charged up after an evening spent presenting their team projects to an audience of tech industry heavyweights, government officials and foreign diplomats.

The projects themselves range from travel sites and online games to an emergency alert system for women, all conceived and coded during eight weeks of the summer holidays. None of the girls had any coding experience before joining the program, and as they presented their work, each project seemed more impressive than the last. Together, they point the way to a new generation of female technology leaders in Mongolia.

“You’re the future, you’re the powerhouse, you’re the engine of change,” Tapan Mishra, resident coordinator for the United Nations in Mongolia, says in a closing speech at the gathering. “You are ready for the world. You are ready to open new doors and new windows, for your own careers, but also to make sure that Mongolian girls are noticed in the world. You can really matter. You will lead Mongolia to what it needs to become.”

Several of the girls I meet express confidence that they are indeed ready for the world — and ready to pursue their dreams of a future in tech.

“I want to continue with coding. … I want to go to the United States and study software engineering at MIT,” says 18-year-old Enkhzul, referring to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Together with her FPG (Future Programmer Girls) teammates Byambajargal, Batzul and Davaajargal, Enkhzul has spent the program developing an online game that combines Mongolian horse racing and shagai (a kind of dice traditionally made from the ankle bones of sheep). After their presentation, the girls tour the room, allowing guests — including the leaders of some of the country’s largest telecom and technology companies — to try out their game on a laptop. It is fun and simple — and surprisingly intuitive to play, as they quickly find.

When asked if she would like to stay in the U.S. after her studies and pursue a career at one of the tech giants, Enkhzul’s answer comes without hesitation: “No, not at all. I want to go back to Mongolia and use my skills and work with tech here. One day, I’d like to start my own company and spread information about our culture. I want my company to be a world-famous Mongolian brand.”

Of the thousands of girls who applied for the Girls for Coding program, 50 were admitted in 2022 through a three-stage selection process. They then received hundreds of hours of tailor-made training in coding, delivered by tutors from the School of Applied Science and Engineering at the National University of Mongolia. IT and finance industry executives also visited the camp to share their experience and insights.

For many of those participating, the closing ceremony was an emotional roller-coaster, the whole evening a culmination of two months of hard work and dedication, sleepless nights, computers breaking down just days before deadline, and the general frustrations of the sort only understood by coders. One could feel how a sense of sisterhood had formed among the girls. After their presentations, the excitement turned to relief, and finally deflation, as it suddenly dawned on them that two months of blood, sweat, tears and toil had come to an end. It was time to go home. Tears sprang quickly to many a tired young eye.

The ceremony was also attended by a cohort of girls from the previous year. “I remember the feeling,” said one of the 2022 graduates. “Saying goodbye to everyone but also a feeling of almost mentally collapsing because the camp and hard work was over.”

She added that the program had helped her grow as a person. “Before joining the boot camp, I didn’t have much self-confidence. I didn’t think I could do it or speak to strangers. But I did do it, and I’m a much more confident woman today. Perhaps that was the most important win for me, perhaps even more important than learning to code.”

The program was initiated by Bolor-Erdene Battsengel, one of Mongolia’s most widely known tech personalities and a woman recognized as much for her sense of style as for having driven a revolution in public services for the digital age.

Bolor-Erdene says she started Girls for Coding to sow the seeds of a digital future for Mongolia by making space for women in tech.

“I’m so proud of the girls; they are all fantastic,” she said. “I wish I could expand the program to the whole world. I try to give the girls opportunities. I’m not forcing them to become software engineers, but I’m giving them opportunities to see the options are there to become a software engineer or work in tech.”

Her overall aim is to transform Mongolia into a “digital first” country. In Mongolia, women generally have a higher level of education than men do, but they lag behind in IT participation.

Empowering young women is essential to achieving sustainable economic development, according to the World Bank. In a recent 2023 Mongolia outlook report, the World Bank said the country would benefit from more inclusive job creation, and called for more labor force participation by women and better opportunities for young people in general. Despite the fact that Mongolian women are better educated than their male peers and have higher rates of literacy, they are also less likely to make use of this education. Initiatives such as the girls’ coding boot camp, and an emerging tech startup scene that has a more inclusive outlook, are welcomed as steps forward.

Bolor-Erdene’s own background is not much different from that of many of the boot camp girls. She grew up in Bulgan province in the northern part of Mongolia. She excelled in mathematics in school and had a knack for computers, but many of her teachers discouraged her from pursuing higher education or a career in tech. Instead, they recommended more “female” professions such as administration jobs. Bolor-Erdene, however, had different plans.

Over the years, her hard work and passion for social development took her from a rural town on the Mongolian steppe to the center of government. At 14, she graduated from high school, and at 18 she finished college and went on to the University of Oxford, where she studied public policy. She worked for 10 years in international development, including with the U.N., the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. At the age of 29, she became vice minister in Mongolia’s Ministry of Digital Development and Communications, becoming the youngest person to attain a senior post in the Mongolian government. Bolor-Erdene has since left her ministerial position and is now completing a policy fellowship at Oxford, while also running the Girls for Coding program.

Her role, as she sees it, is not just to drive digitalization in her country and attract investment, but to spread the word about its startups and tech champions to the wider world. On many occasions, she has taken Mongolian startup founders to international events and conferences to connect with luminaries such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and facilitate introductions to foreign investors and tech executives.

“I always tell people that Mongolia is a hidden gem,” she says. “It is a hidden technology gem that is booming now. Investors need to get in early to find the best opportunities, so what I am telling people is to come and take a look, check us out.”

“Our economy used to be all about mining. Technology offers Mongolia a second chance. That’s what I am working to achieve,” she adds.

Gantumur Luvsannyam, leader of the country’s opposition Democratic Party and a former minister for education and science, agrees that there is great potential in Mongolia’s future as an innovation hub.

“We want to lower taxes so money instead will go to research and development,” he said. “My vision of Mongolia is that we become a science-based country. We must strive to become the ‘Silicon Steppe.'”

In a 2022 Global Rankings Report by StartupBlink, a startup research center based in Israel, Mongolia was ranked 81st in the world, up from 103rd in 2020 when it first appeared in the survey. The country ranked 14th in Asia.

“I’m very optimistic about the future of Mongolia’s tech startup scene,” said Eli David, head of StartupBlink. “Mongolia’s scene started late, and they are fighting against the wind. But if they keep pushing, they can create a good ecosystem for the future.”

To realize such ambitions, innovators and investors who can show long-term commitment will be key. If they attract the right support, it would not be surprising to see some of the young girls from Ulaanbaatar’s Girls for Coding boot camp emerge as tomorrow’s creators and disrupters, providing tech solutions that reshape lives in Mongolia and beyond.