Emma Okonji
The Co-founders of Girl Code Academy, Peter Ogedengbe and Adeola Haruna, have stressed the need for the empowerment of girls with technology skills that will enhance nation development.
According them, the percentage of female participation in technology related courses and programmes, remained low in Nigeria, while stressing the need for more involvement of women in technology skills acquisition.
“As a Tech Lead in one of the leading technology companies in the country, I decided to co-found the Girl Code Academy with Adeola Haruna, a female expert in software programming.
The Girl Code Academy is a platform that offers technology skills in software programming and coding for young female university graduates, irrespective of their disciplines.
“At Girl Code Academy, we carry out eight weeks intensive training programme annually. We started in 2017, and since then we have trained over 200 young girls that have graduated from university. This year, we plan to have two bathes of training programme. In the first batch, we are training 60 out of which 50 will be trained as front-end web developers, and the remaining 10 on advanced web programming, while the second batch will be coming up in December this year,” Ogedengbe said.
Speaking on the selection process for the training programme, Ogedengbe said: “Every year we advertise and we receive several applications and we invite them for interview and shortlist to a sizable number that we can comfortably train. This year we had over 700 applications, and we shortlisted 60 in the first batch and another 50 in the second batch. The training is completely free of charge and we expect them to take full advantage of the training programme.”
According to him, the academy has trained web developers in their hundreds who are gainfully employed after the training, while some became employers of labour.
Haruna, who is also the Programme Director at Girl Code Academy, said the academy, through its annual training programme, would train more female programmers to compete with the men that have dominated the technology industry.
President, Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) Dr. Yele Okeremi, commended the efforts of the academy in keying into the vision of smart nations that are using technology to drive wealth. “Women empowerment is key because empowering the women in ICT skills is as good as empowering the entire nation because of the unique position and role of women in nation building,” Okeremi said.
Participants for the first batch training were excited to have been selected and promised to maximize the opportunity offered them by the academy.
