Africa Code Week Uganda Launch

Africa Code Week will take place in Uganda on 28th October 2016 with the support of SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, and the Galway Education Centre from Ireland. Activities will be spearheaded locally by four partners - Makerere University, Women in Technology Uganda, Resilient Africa Network (RAN) and The HiveCOLAB.

Africa Code Week aims to foster digital literacy and equip the continent’s rising generation of young people with job-relevant digital skills. This year the initiative will train more than 150,000 youth across 30 African countries in computer use and coding.

Speaking at the launch, the Ambassador of Ireland to Uganda, H.E. Dónal Cronin, said:

“Coding has the power to put millions of young African people on the path to successful careers and development. Africa Code Week is a marvelous initiative and we are very excited to support the participation by Uganda this year. Uganda has one of the youngest populations in the world, where the average age is 14, and so Africa Code Week will, we hope, ignite further the empowerment of young people and help give them the skills they need to thrive in the digital age.”

Dr. Roseline Akol, Head of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Makerere University added:

“It is important that Uganda builds a skills base to enable it to benefit from the next industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, which will see artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the ‘internet of things’ and elastic networking transform society in ways that we have not even imagined yet.”

Participants in Africa Code Week in Uganda this year will include students from both Primary and Secondary Schools across Kampala. Students have already been introduced to basic coding by visits from young enthusiastic third level students, and this will culminate in the Africa Code Week Day on October 28th in Makerere University.

To learn more about Africa Code Week see www.africacodeweek.org.