Making computer science accessible to more students in Africa

Computer Science (CS) fosters innovation, critical thinking and empowers students with the skills to create powerful tools to solve major challenges. Yet, many students, especially in their the early years, do not have access to opportunities to develop their technical skills.

At Google, we believe that all students deserve these opportunities. That is why,  in line with our commitment to prepare 10 million people in Africa for jobs of the future, we are funding 60 community organisations to hold training workshops during Africa Code Week 2017.These workshops will give over 50,000 students a chance to engage with CS and learn programming and computational-thinking skills.

Africa Code Week is a grassroots movement that encourages programming by showing how to bring ideas to life with code, demystifying these skills and bringing motivated students together to learn. Google has been involved in this campaign as a primary partner to SAP since 2015, providing sponsorships to organizations running initiatives to introduce students to CS.

This year, we received more than 300 applications from community organizations across Africa. We worked with the Cape Town Science Centre to select and fund 60 of these organizations that will deliver CS workshops to children and teens (ages 8 to 18) from October 18-25 in 10 African countries (Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, South Africa, Gambia and Togo).

Some of the initiatives we are supporting include:

• The Samburu Girls Code program by Modcom: introduces 300+ girls, rescued from child marriage in Kenya, to programming and help them build basic mobile app.
  
• Tech2Slum Innovation program by Greativation: helps 500+ teenagers from lower socioeconomic areas of Nigeria to experience coding for the first time.
  
• Code for Change Clubs: organizes fun-filled hands-on programming activities for 1700 kids across 9 schools in 4 provinces of South Africa.
  
• Association pour la Refondation Laïque du Togo: organizes programming workshops for special needs children and youths from rural areas of Togo.
  
• You can read more about the 60 sponsorship recipients and the activities they’ve planned on the Africa Code Week website. We also participated in the European Commission’s Europe Code Week 2017, funding 60 coding initiatives in 33 European countries.
  

Google is delighted to support these great efforts. Congratulations to the recipient organizations. Step into the world of Google in Computer Science Education at edu.google.com/cs.

by Obum Ekeke via The Keyword