By PHYLLIS BIRORI in Kigali, Rwanda
KIGALI, (CAJ News) – THE second edition of the continent’s prime digital literacy initiative has officially kicked off in Rwanda with the aiming of empowering some 150 000 youth aged between 8 and 24 in the African continent.
The Africa Code Week, a project by SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, has been launched in the capital Kigali with the participation of United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and Rwandan Ministry of Education as strategic partners.
The nine-day event will host over a thousand live workshops across 30 African countries as well as online courses, ranging from Scratch all the way to Web programming.
Founded and orchestrated by SAP in partnership with the Cape Town Science Centre and the Galway Education Centre, Africa Code Week relies on a growing network of nonprofits, government bodies, educational organizations, NGOs and corporations across the continent.
For the second year in a row, Google Inc. supported Africa Code Week 2016 by empowering organizations across Africa with micro-grants so they could multiply computational thinking and coding activities all over Africa using Google CS First enrichment materials.
“Beyond coding as a language, we are imparting the right skills and attitudes and a culture of innovation and creativity among young Africans,” says Claire Gillissen-Duval, Director or EMEA Corporate Social
Responsibility at SAP and Africa Code Week Global Lead.
“Africa Code Week is also shedding light on how public-private partnerships can be renewed in the digital age for greater impact: if young Africans see that governments, nonprofits and the private sector are
working as one voice to deliver on joint education priorities, trust is seeded and they feel encouraged to start owning and living their dreams,” she concludes.
In preparation for Africa Code Week 2016, SAP has deployed its own IT experts as skilled volunteers to train 6 000 teachers, parents and local volunteers throughout the year, all over Africa.
These live Train-the-Trainer sessions, combined with access to online courses on the openSAP platform beyond the actual event time, enable Africa Code Week and partners to scale the impact continent-wide and in the long run
Gillissen-Duval says Code Week is all about mobilizing the collective expertise and resources at local level, scalable structure for inter-group knowledge sharing, unlocking people’s potential and desire to serve as resources.
As the largest digital initiative organized on African continent, SAP Africa Code Week received a Communication for Future award in the category ‘Education of the Future’ from the World Communications Forum in Davos in March.
–Guardian
