Over 200 teachers, volunteers and unemployed graduates are set to undergo training as Nigeria takes on a leading role in the build-up to the SAP Africa Code Week (ACW) 2017.
Founded in 2015, ACW seeks to empower African youth with coding skills through hands-on and playful learning.
Spearheaded by world leaders in enterprise software, SAP, in collaboration with partners, this year’s digital literacy event aims to introduce software coding to more than 500 000 youth across 35 African countries during October.
Nigeria, the continent’s biggest economy and most populous country, will play host to a series of official train-the-trainer (TTT) workshop sessions.
TTT workshops in the south-western Ondo State will take place on August 22 and 23.
They are open to all school teachers and any other parties interested in becoming part of ACW.
Pedro Guerreiro, Managing Director for SAP West Africa, said TTT workshops, which enabled the “teachers of today to groom the innovators of tomorrow”, provided a platform for the transfer of skills from ‘Master Instructors’ to parents, teachers and volunteers.
“This empowers them to become teachers who can train students in their local communities, creating a multiplication effect,” said Guerreiro.
Ondo’s vision is to take Africa Code Week into the Nigeria neighbourhoods,to ensure no child is left behind.
Governor Oluwarotimi Odunayo Akeredolu, said the opportunity to train our community in code provides an avenue to generate employment for youth and
provides much-needed technology skills to make them a valuable resource with the capability to work globally.
“It is programmes like these that help showcase Nigeria’s game changing acts of solidarity and harmony to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, changing one country at a time while supporting growth through technology,” the governor said.
Olumbe Akinkugbe, Senior Special Assistant to the Governor on ICT, said coding is the job currency of the future.
“ACW proves that public-private partnerships can be a strategic means to affect change, it is in-line with our pursuit of making Akure the tech hub of Nigeria and we are proud to be part of this programme,” the aide said.
Taking place from October 18-25, ACW helps shape the future workforce by sparking interest in software coding with participating youth receiving not only basic skills but also invaluable hands-on experience.
The objective is to empower more than 200 000 teachers and reaching 5 million children and youth over the next decade.
United Nations agencies, YouthMobile, the Cape Town Science Centre and Galway Education Centre and Google are among partners.
