COVID hasn’t stopped our Queens from reigning!

Despite all challenges, on Friday 31st May we had our second cohort of Code Queen graduate!! Code Queen is showing promising signs of success.

80% of our first cohort were linked up to our partners including companies, head hunters and universities, with one of our students even going all the way to India to work for Tata!

The program not only imparts highly valuable coding and workplace skills, but the students really put it all to the test through the grande finale where they participate in a hackathon solving a real life challenge for a local business. Previously we’ve had Prudential Uganda and Fenix International, this time around it was designing a driver onboarding system for “Uber of Uganda” Safeboda! Click here to take a look.

The new cohort looks to be even stronger as the feedback from the hackathon judges (tech professionals from partner companies) has been amazing. And to think, most of these young women didn’t even know what HTML was a few months ago!!! 

We usually run our programs at a start-up hub called the Innovation Village who provide us with the infrastructure we need for an effective working environment (classrooms, wifi, laptops, other equipment). Not many of these young women have these resources easily available. Due to COVID, the Village shut down, and like our school in Kenya, we thought we would have to shut the whole program down.

However, these young women are agile and resilient! 50% (19) of them managed to borrow laptops and data to get online every day and learn – they were willing to show up for themselves.

We didn’t know how it would go but online worked well - they were less shy to ask questions on chat than they would be in person. They were more independent. They got into the habit of using Slack. From knowing no code at all they went on blow our judges away. Many of them will go on to internships and/or further refine their skills at our partner institution Refactory. No doubt we will be seeing quite a few of them coming up as star software engineers over the coming year.