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How Peace Corps volunteers taught 4,600 Zambian girls to code
“Girls came to camp never having seen a computer — and left as coders.”
Courtesy of Peace Corps
Peace Corps volunteer Daniel Bevington had a vision: teach young people to code in Zambia.
His project, known as Girls Can Code!, teaches adolescent girls from rural and disadvantaged communities to code by harnessing the power of Raspberry Pi.
Bevington started by assembling the small, low-powered computers in his village and began teaching girls as young as six how to program games. After exploring different configurations that would work in an extremely rural setting, he and fellow volunteer Ashley Riley began to bring their technology education project to life.
“[Girls and young women] return to their communities as teams empowered to share their new knowledge and skills through coding clubs using the low-powered Raspberry Pi systems.” – Daniel Bevington, Peace Corps volunteer
At Girls Can Code! technology camps organized throughout Zambia by Peace Corps volunteers, girls first learn basic computer skills, from typing to using a mouse. By the end of the camp, they are skilled in popular programming languages such as Python and Scratch.
The camps combine coding, gaming, robotics, and computer architecture with lessons on HIV awareness and leadership. There is also a special focus on ubuntu, an African Bantu belief that emphasizes humanity toward one another.
Courtesy of Peace Corps
In the beginning of the week of training, girls and young women don’t know how to use a mouse or keyboard, and may even be afraid of penalties for errors. Peace Corps volunteers encourage students to learn through exploration, exercise creativity, and support each other.
“When teaching about technology, I use a hands-off approach,” Riley said. “For instance, when it was time for them to learn how to use tablets, I handed them out and said, ‘Okay, go ahead and turn them on.’ Many girls looked to me for instruction; I told them they would have to figure it out. Sure enough, just a few moments later they had turned on the tablets, unlocked the screen, typed in the password, and were finding games and typing notes to each other.”
Courtesy of Peace Corps
Working in collaboration with Zambian trainers, Peace Corps volunteers directly reached 112 young women and girls in the first year of the program. Empowered with new knowledge and technical skills, the initial group of girls has since developed their own community coding clubs in rural areas around Zambia, creating an expansive network of more than 4,600 young women coders.
“Most of the girls came to camp having never seen a computer, let alone use one. They left as coders.” – Ashley Riley, Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia
“I met a lot of girls at Girls Can Code!,” said ninth-grader Elizabeth, who participated in a camp last year and now dreams of becoming a software engineer. “They were all amazing. We were all speaking different languages, but we could understand each other because we were all learning the same technology.”
Elizabeth now leads her own technology club for a group of 20 girls and boys between the ages of 11 and 13 in her community.
“There were plenty of people who thought, ‘What are these poor, rural kids going to do with this knowledge?’” Bevington said. “But we persevered.”
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