Girls go coding at EduWeek

Girls Invent Tomorrow, an initiative designed to empower, educate and mentor girls about the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector, is running its next coding workshop this week.

“We started training girls on the basics of coding earlier this year and are on a dedicated course to continue doing so for the foreseeable future,” says Thuli Sibeko, Founder of Girls Invent Tomorrow.

Sibeko is hosting a coding workshop at this week’s EduWeek alongside Hlulani Baloyi, official South African ambassador for Girl Rising, an international programme designed to encourage more young women to take up a career in IT. The workshop aims to train another 20 girls from the greater Gauteng region, bringing the total number of girls trained this year thus far to over 60 girls.

The training sessions focus on educating a small group of girls each time, allowing for one-on-one engagements with the girls. This format promotes open engagement amongst the girls, encouraging them to fully immerse themselves into the session and to take as much as possible away from the coding session”, says Sibeko.

Intel South Africa, a sponsor to the Girls Invent Tomorrow initiative, has once again partnered with Sibeko and her organization to bring the coding workshop to life.

Intel, as part of its recently launched She Will Connect programme, aims to improve digital literacy skills amongst women and girls by integrating digital literacy training into gender and development programmes,” says Thabani Khupe, Corporate Affairs Director at Intel South Africa.

Khupe continues to advocate that by providing access and training to skills such as coding, a greater impact can be made. That when girls and women are connected to the world through technology, they are connected to a world of opportunity. Technology, and the Internet in particular, has transformed the lives of billions of people. It functions as a gateway to ideas, resources, and opportunities that never could have been realised before. All around the world, the Internet is helping people to imagine new possibilities.

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