SAP Africa Code Week returns to invest in Nigeria’s teachers

Over the next weeks Nigeria will play host to a series of official train-the-trainer (TTT) workshop sessions as the country takes on a leading role in the build-up to 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 SAP, world leaders in enterprise software, and with the support of UNESCO, YouthMobile, the Cape Town Science Centre, the Galway Education Centre, Google and over 100 public and private partners, this year’s digital literacy event aims to introduce software coding to more than 500,000 youth across 35 African countries in eight days during October.

“TTT workshops enable the teachers of today to groom the innovators of tomorrow.  These workshops provide 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”, says Pedro Guerreiro, Managing Director for SAP West Africa in a press statement.

“We need knowledgeable instructors to teach the children during Africa Code Week 2017 and will collaborate with Ondo State to train 200 teachers and 50 volunteers as well as unemployed graduates from across the region.  The vision of Ondo State is a remarkable one; to take Africa Code Week into the Nigeria hinterlands, to ensure that no child is left behind. In addition to this, it is commendable that unemployed graduates are included in the TTT’s as the training will contribute to the digital skills required to enter the competitive job market.”

By 2020, 80% of all jobs will be Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) related, and bold approaches are required to bring coherence and scale to digital literacy interventions across Africa. The objective of ACW is to empower as many people as possible, positively impacting more than 200,000 teachers and reaching in excess of five million children and youth over the next ten years.

According to His Excellency Governor Oluwarotimi Odunayo Akeredolu, “The opportunity to train our community in code provides an avenue to generate employment for our 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.”

Adding to this, Olumbe Akinkugbe, Senior Special Assistant to the Governor on ICT, said in a press statement, “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 program.”

Taking place from 18-25 October, 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 initiative provides learners from the ages of 8-17 with the opportunity to program their own animations.

Older learners, aged 18-24, are provided with a basic understanding of website architecture, teaching them how to develop a fully operational and mobile-friendly website. The event provides a number of ways for the public to get involved, over and above actual attendance, opportunity exists for interested parties to host a free coding workshop, but to also receive free online training in Scratch (free software which simplifies the face of coding for youth).

The TTT workshops in Ondo State will take place on 22 and 23 August, at the Public Service Training Institute, Ilara-Mokin, Via Akure. TTT workshops are open to all school teachers and any other parties interested in becoming part of ACW. Attendees will receive 90 minutes of training, a USB with course notes and Scratch (coding programme) pre-loaded, T-shirts and a training certificate upon completion.