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Why and how government should encourage coding education

By Peter Oluka
15 December 2017   |   4:27 am
Coding education has been identified as critical to prepare young people with requisite skills for future jobs and that is why governments must embrace the programme to reduce unemployment, Mr. Olajide Ajayi, ambassador Africa Code Week Nigeria, in a chat with Nigeria CommunicationsWeek underscored the benefits of learning to code at a young age. Ajayi…

A set of children during a code training exercise in Lagos.

Coding education has been identified as critical to prepare young people with requisite skills for future jobs and that is why governments must embrace the programme to reduce unemployment,

Mr. Olajide Ajayi, ambassador Africa Code Week Nigeria, in a chat with Nigeria CommunicationsWeek underscored the benefits of learning to code at a young age.

Ajayi said, “…cannot be overemphasized. Yes, it is agreed that not all future jobs would require you to be a coder, what’s certain is that most would require collateral skills and competencies that can be acquired through coding education”.

“Such essential skills”, Ajayi noted” are as logical and critical reasoning, patience, attention to detail, self-reliance, language and memorization are all examples of skills one can gain through coding Education”.

Launched in 2015 by SAP EMEA, in partnership with the Cape Town Science Centre and the Galway Education Centre, Africa Code Week is an initiative that brings together hundreds of schools, teachers, governments, businesses and non-profit organisations with the aim to empower young people across Africa with digital literacy skills.

In the report released earlier in the week, Claire Gillissen-Duval, director of EMEA Corporate Social Responsibility at SAP and global project lead for Africa Code Week, explained “We also saw unprecedented collaboration between our public and private sector partners, as well as from NGOs such as Code For Change that leveraged their participation in Africa Code Week 2017 to scale coding classes across 100 secondary schools in SA over the next 12 months.”

The initiative, which took place in October, is now actively supported by UNESCO YouthMobile, Google, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, 15 African governments, over 100 partners and 100 ambassadors across the continent.

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