A wide range of teenage girls from across the Middle East descended on Washington, DC, on June 25. Some dressed in long sleeves and double-layered hijabs and others in miniskirts with their hair flowing down their backs, they had all come for Tech Girls 2013, an international exchange program that provides girls with three weeks of intensive tech training, mentoring and cultural immersion.

This group of 27 was chosen out of 650 applicants for a State Department initiative implemented by Legacy International, a Virginia-based organization. It was easy to forget that the girls have yet to finish high school as they thoughtfully laid out their ideas. Determined, driven and aware of the global politics that inform their lives, all of them inherently understood the importance of tech literacy for whichever field they ultimately choose — whether that would be the future of green energy, search-engine software or music.

“I’m addicted to green energy,” said Mai Mohammed Foad Hal. “They call me Miss Electricity.” Hal, 16, lives in Port Said, Egypt and her current pet project concerns water. She wants to develop a mechanism that can extract moisture from the air and convert it to liquid than can be used on a large scale. And as Egypt, which historically depends on water rights to the Nile, increasingly battles Ethiopia and other upstream countries, water will certainly be an issue to reckon with. But Hal’s drive is not born of a purely patriotic purpose.

“We should think about other countries," she said. "We are on one continent. We are all Africans.”