RIYADH: Forty Saudi women have become the first to acquire certificates from a training program for the maintenance of mobile phones which was offered by the General Organization for Technical Education and Vocational Training. These women can now say goodbye to Mursalat Complex, the most famous market for the maintenance of mobiles in Riyadh.

A recent tour of the market, which included interviews with the trainers and trainees in the workshop, revealed that these women are determined not to go to Mursalat Complex to fix their mobiles anymore, and that they will fix and repair their own devices from now on.

Maryam Al-Subaie, who trains 19 women in the morning shift and 21 in the evening, said she made a deal with the trainees that they would not go anymore to mobile shops to mend their mobiles or program them, as they will be capable of handling these tasks by themselves and for their families until they get a job in the field or have the chance to open their own shops.

“The girls were very excited and enthusiastic to acquire the needed skills to maintain all types and brands of mobiles to the degree that some have even opened up their own devices for their own training.

They were not satisfied with the devices allocated for training and wanted to focus on all kinds of state-of the-art devices in order to understand all the details involved in handling the different devices,” added the trainer.

She said the thing that made her optimistic about the training program is that on the third day of the training, her mobile needed fixing and she asked the driver to take it to Mursalat Complex, but the female trainees got angry at the suggestion and said: “What are we doing here then? What should we do with our training?"

She said they insisted on repairing it and actually did.

One of the trainees, Nora Al-Balushi said from the first day of training she and her female colleagues decided not to go the mobile market unless they became employees or employers of a mobile shop.

“The training program was enough to work in the sector because it included how to dismantle a device, repair it, and rebuild it in addition to hardware decoding and welding and all the other operations involved,” said Al-Balushi.

She added that one of the reasons for her to take this decision was acquiring the necessary skills so that others who would otherwise repair the devices cannot breach her privacy and get access to the personal data on her mobile phone.

Amal Ahamd, a trainer, said: “It seemed to me that the girls are determined to succeed. Even if they did not get a job, the training program will bring personal benefit to them,” she added.

The second phase of the implementation of the training programs for the maintenance of mobiles witnessed a rise in the number of female applicants of about 18 percent. The electronic portal for the training program received about 58,000 applications from both young men and women.