SAP Africa Code Week officially arrives in Angola

Over the next few days Angola will play host to a series of train-the-trainer (TTT) workshops during the official build-up to SAP Africa Code Week (ACW), taking place in Luanda from 4 to 5 October.

Founded in 2015, ACW is a continent-wide initiative to simplify the face of software coding for Africa’s youth. The initiative’s objective is to spread digital literacy across the continent and start shaping tomorrow’s skilled workforce through hands-on and playful learning. Spearheaded by SAP, world leader in enterprise software, the initiative is supported by hundreds of international partners as well as local Angola partners, including; Cod Cod Codet, the Ministry of Education in Angola, the American Embassy, the French Embassy, Vivre En Angola‘s website and community, the Lycée Alioune Blondin Leye, the ONG Mulemba, Instituto Superior Técnico de Angola (ISTA), The University of Agostinho Neto. Of particular interest is the collaboration with the school Dom Bosco, an innovative, adaptive programme working with young disadvantaged children living in urban areas in Luanda.

Last year’s ACW event saw more than 89,000 youngsters across 17 African countries introduced to software coding within a mere ten days – four times the initial goal. The aim for 2016 is to double that, reaching a minimum of 150,000 youth across 30 African countries – with Angola having its first code experience of ACW.

This week’s TTT workshops will provide a platform for the transfer of skills and knowledge from ‘Master Instructors’ to local parents, teachers and educators, enabling them to become the next expert coding teachers who can train potential students in their communities. Aimed at local school teachers, the TTT workshops will seek to train hundreds of Angola participants. The objective is to empower as many people as possible, with the long-term goal to empower more than 200,000 teachers reaching in excess of five million children and youth over the next ten years.

TTT workshops will be conducted in Portuguese and will take place in Luanda on Tuesday, 4 October and Wednesday, 5 October at the school Dom Bosco, (cf. Google map here), in de municipe de Sambizanga. The workshops are open to all school teachers and any other parties interested in becoming part of ACW. Attendees will receive 90 minutes of software coding training based on MIT’s Scratch system, a USB with course notes in Portuguese with Scratch pre-loaded and a training certificate upon completion. The objective is for participants to take the skillset back to their communities and host sessions for children during the official ACW event in October 15-23.