National Coding Camp with 450 girls underway in Ethiopia
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UN Women, the African Union (AU) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), through their flagship program, the African Girls Can Code Initiative (AGCCI) and in partnership with the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and financial support from Denmark, has launched a National Coding Camp at the African Union in Addis Ababa on 30th July 2019.
Similar Camps were also launched on the same date in Adama, Oromia and Hawassa, Southern Nations Nationalities and People’s (SNNP) regions. Each Camp has 150 girls drawn from all high schools in the cities making the total number of participants 450. These were selected through Ministry of Education and Education Bureaus in the two regions.
The Camps which will be held from 30th July to 16th August 2019 aim to empower young girls by exposing and equipping them with critical skills including basic concepts around digital literacy and coding. The coding content includes Scratch* & Scratch Deep Diving, Computer Science and basic Graphic Design skills.
During the Opening of the Addis Ababa Camp at the African Union, Mme Letty Chiwara, UN Women representative to Ethiopia, AU and UNECA remarked “ ICT is the future and is going to drive economies across the world, as Africa, as women, we need to prepare ourselves to be part of that, otherwise we will be left out. As data shows, there is a huge gender gap in Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics, we need to work on bringing more girls to these fields to close the gap and now is the right time to do so,”.
Her Excellency Ms. Tsion Teklu, State Minister of Ministry of Education in Ethiopia said “Despite the fact that working with girls will benefit the society at large, girls have been left out from STEM and ICT because of the culture that says they cannot be successful in such fields. It is time to challenge that assumption and excel in these fields. Now UN Women, AU , ITU and their sponsors, Denmark are giving you the opportunity to do so”
*Scratch is a free visual programming language developed to help simplify the process of creating and programming animations, games, music, interactive stories