Vodacom Lesotho trains girls to code in order to advance gender parity and promote diversity and inclusion

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Image Credit: Sunday Express

This past week, Vodacom Lesotho Foundation hosted a Coding Camp for girls in St. Monicas, Leribe. This is to continue on their mandate to advance gender parity and promote diversity and inclusion.

The free workshop was designed to give girls in Form D and E practical experience in introductory website development using Bootstrap, CSS and HTML and basic design techniques.

This initiative aims to encourage female participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); a male-dominated field that is expanding globally. The camps also aim to afford girls an opportunity to explore countless possibilities of what they can do with code to solve problems in their communities.

Launched in 2017, the Vodacom Code Like A Girl project is aimed at girls aged between 14 and 18 and hopes to encourage girls to develop an interest in ICT careers through learning how to code.

“It is an extensive global training programme for girls to help them engage with the technology industry and encourage them to consider technology as a career path in the future. The programme runs throughout the 27 countries that Vodafone operates across, and as part of the programme each country is mandated to host a four-day coding course for girls,” the company explained.

The Code Like A Girl programme is implemented in South-Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, DRC and Lesotho, with over 755 young girls being trained in 2019.

Executive Head of Foundation Molemo Motseki told ITWebAfrica that, “Empowering women and helping young people increase their skill-set through technology are two important areas of focus for Vodacom as part of the Company’s ten year sustainable goals. By 2025, Vodafone’s ambition is to be the best employer for women. Over and above that, this initiative is a continuation of the Foundation’s mandate to advance gender parity and promote diversity and inclusion.”

The Vodacom Foundation was mandated to invest in critical areas of development, in line with the Government of Lesotho’s national strategic development plan. Since 2009, the Vodacom Lesotho Foundation has invested a total of close to M8 Million, in the areas of health, education, social welfare, gender equity and women empowerment, youth empowerment, sports, and cultural development.

To date, Vodacom has trained over 380 girls in programming and looks to train 1500 girls by March 2020.

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