With the advent of the upcoming Africa Code Week (ACW) which is going to be rolling out across the African continent, we wanted to give you a glimpse of the reasons why Camara Education Ethiopia is keen on its implementation within Ethiopia and how it‘s partnering with ACW to make that a reality and impactful within the learners community in Ethiopia.
According to ACW, the movement to teach coding to young learners started with the idea to bridge the digital skill gap that will be present in the next 25 years within the African continent. This means that as the population growth booms, the digital technical knowhow that these generations have will feature a large gap between those who have access and those who don’t. This movement thus partnered up with leading technology companies to teach coding to young learners across the African continent on a yearly basis. This is done through the use of open source visual coding software called Scratch that young learners can use to have an understanding of coding and build small applications through it.
As Camara Education Ethiopia is working to improve access to more streamlined education through the use of technology, it was the perfect initiative to be part of. We, as an organisation, are working on building better stocked and efficient e-learning centers across schools in Ethiopia. Until now, 460,790 learners in 1054 schools across 5 regions were able to take advantage of the integration of technology into the classroom. Overall, 7242 educators and school leaders were able to take part in our capacity building training as part of delivering 25,918 computers into these schools.
Our partnership with ACW started 3 years ago when we were an organising partner for East Africa. We have organised Africa Code Week events in Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. In the last two years, Camara Education was able to train over 25,000 learners across Ethiopia.
This year we are also gearing up to reach more schools and engage more learners across the country and thus expose young learners to coding. Over the next 2 weeks, we will be conducting Teach-the-Trainer sessions for 28 educators from 11 schools in Robe, Bale Zone (Oromia), for 15 educators from 4 schools in Fitche Zone (Oromia), 23 educators from 10 schools in Oromia Special Zone, 21 trainees in 6 schools in Ensaro Zone (Amhara), 44 educators from 20 schools in Addis Ababa, 43 educators in 20 schools in Silte Zone (SNNPR), 43 educators in 20 schools in Gurage Zone (SNNPR), and 43 educators in 20 schools in Wolayta Zone (SNNPR). In total, we will train 260 trainees in 111 schools.
These trained educators will be conducting their own coding sessions in their respective schools during the actual live continent wide Coding session from October 17 – October 25. During this week, we expect 333 coding sessions in 111 schools through which 50,000 learners will be training in basic coding.
Our activities are already rolling out with our work in training educators across the regions in preparation for the actual Africa Code Week event which will be from October 17 – October 25.
For more information on our related activities within this month check out our social media platforms on Twitter, Vimeo, Instagram and Facebook. For more information on the Africa Code Week check their website here. To check out the software that’s used for teaching coding you can check out their website here which comes bundled with all the computers that Camara Education Ethiopia provides to schools within its intervention areas.
And not even power cuts to the school will stop the students, when they will still line-up in the hope the electricity happens to be restored during the their one, 30-minute chance of the week to access ICT. 
Access to ICT – backed-up by extensive teacher training, offline digital learning programmes and IT support – is one long-term measure to help lift those millions out of poverty and Camara is to the forefront in the country’s educational advancement. 
