Mandela Month Inspiration: Over the years, GirlCode has provided coding training to over 62000 girls and young women across the country through the Gircoder club, online coding bootcamp and hackathons. Through these initiatives, many young girls have been given an opportunity to develop their skills in software development and exposure to other careers in STEM.
According to Zandile Mkwanazi Chief Executive Officer of GirlCode,” One of our key visions is to see GirlCode impacting over 10 million young people across Africa over the next 10 years and one day becoming an institution of choice for females who are interested in STEM and digital technology.
In the past year, we struggled to host most of our programs due to Covid-19 restrictions.
“Covid 19 restrictions have had an adverse impact on most of us in one way or the other, and for GirlCode it resulted to setbacks with facilitating our activities as they require physical gatherings. This also has shown us that by not going into communities to conduct our programs it becomes more difficult to get young people to participate, and this is purely based on our learners not having their own tools and resources to practice our programs, says Mkwanazi.
In celebration of Mandela Month, GirlCode would like to appeal to companies and individuals across South Africa to donate a laptop, which will be used by our learners. We will identify 67 young ladies from the organization who are in need of laptops to resume their coding learning and practices.
“Most companies/organizations replace their laptops annually and we would like to appeal to these organizations as well as individuals who have spare laptops at their disposal to please donate the laptops to us, for the purpose of reusing them and sharing coding skills with the youth,” concludes Mkwanazi.
“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.” – Nelson Mandela
To take part in this Mandela Month Campaign contact Zandile Mkwanazi, Chairwoman via email at sponsor@girlcode.co.za.
Our Editor Dumi Mbona has written an unemployment survival guide, a solution based book for people who have lost employment or lost everything in life!