Africa Code Week 2018: 36 participating countries for this year’s event
The fourth edition of the yearly event Africa Code Week, kicked-off this year in South Africa, on October 5th, on the occasion of the World Teachers Day. The event will continue until October 31st.
Since its inception in 2015, Africa Code Week has introduced over 1.8 million African youth to coding skills in multiple African countries while facilitating the integration of ICT education in the school curriculum for more than 28,000 teachers and educators across the continent. This year, Africa Code Week aims to engage an additional 600 000 youth across 36 African countries in 2018.
What is Africa Code Week ?
Spearheaded by SAP in 2015 as part of its social investments to drive sustainable growth in Africa, Africa Code Week is a digital skills development initiative that has benefitted 1.8 million young Africans so far
The long-term goal of Africa Code Week is to widen access to coding workshops and resources to more than 5 million children and youth by 2025.
Africa Code Week 2018 is divided in two main phases: the training of teachers, followed by the training of students. 36 countries are participating in this year’s event.
Its 2017 edition has been a huge success, which involved 1.3 million youth in workshops and training. The female participation rate has been 43%, reflecting the efforts of ACW to empower girls with digital skills and to foster gender equality.
The 2018 edition of Africa Code Week
“This year’s edition launched on UNESCO’s World Teachers’ Day, established in the 1990s to promote teachers’ status in the interest of quality education. The initiative forms part of SAP’s global commitment to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goals 4 (Quality Education) and 5 (Gender Equality).”
“On a mission to empower 70 000 teachers and positively impact the lives of 2 million young Africans by 2020, Africa Code Week is supporting governments’ sustainable capacity building strategies. Every year between June and September, SAP funds a series of Train-the-Trainer (TTT) sessions to empower teachers with skills and teaching materials that drive the advance of digital skills in the school curriculum. As part of this year’s TTTs organized across 20 countries in the build-up to the 2018 edition, 500 teachers were trained in Ghana, 1,200 in Nigeria, 200 in Madagascar, and another 1,000 in Botswana.”
This year, each country got to decide the specific 1 or 2-week October time frame for Africa Code Week to take place for their students. Here is the updated calendar, in each country, for this year’s code week: Calendar
Sources: Unesco; Africa.com
