‘Girls Go IT’ Nigeria, a social development platform intent on empowering girls from rural and under-served communities to acquire digital and information technology skills has announced that 10 girls from 2 secondary schools are currently under-going a 12- week intensive training in front-end development and project management skills in the pilot phase of the ‘Girls Go IT’ summer boot camp in Mushin, Lagos.
Speaking on the programme, Program Manager of ‘Girl GO IT’ Nigeria, Mr. Kunle Afolayan said, “Digital and ICT skills are invaluable in today’s world. Our seasonal boot camp will be focused on bringing ICT to girls in rural communities, we recognize that acquiring these skills offer them limitless opportunities for entrepreneurship and economic empowerment. Our aim is to set girls, who ordinarily may never have been exposed to ICT, on the path to innovation, flexibility and financial freedom.”
“Though we’ve seen some an increase in the number of Nigerians embracing careers in IT, web designers and ICT hardware engineering, there is still a huge gap in the ratio of men to women in the industry and this is what we are joining other like-minded organisations across the world to bridge by helping young girls go IT.” Mr Abayomi Ogundipe, Project Lead added.
The training which will hold every Saturday for 12 weeks commenced July 23 and runs till October 2016. The course syllabus comes in three modules of Personal Development where the students will learn the concept of team work and discovery, Product Prototyping where they will learn about ideation, development and offline web mapping through paper drawing. The third module is the Web App Development where the will learn full stack HTML&CSS, JavaScript and database management.
GirlsGoIT was founded in Moldova with the vision of boosting the entrepreneurship and innovation capacity of women and girls by empowering them to acquire digital and IT Skills. The organisation plans to increase the number of Nigerian participants in its training by covering more rural areas of the country as the programme unfolds.