Ronke Kehinde/
Thousands of students in Lagos have benefitted from the state government’s initiative meant to teach one million Lagosians how to code by 2019.
According to the Lagos State Ministry of Education, the primary driver of the initiative known as CodeLagos, the first phase of the project trained 5464 students from 65 schools, including public and privately-owned primary as well as secondary schools across the state.
This revelation was made by the Special Adviser to the Governor on Education, Obafela Bank-Olemoh, who went further to give a breakdown of the schools that have partaken in the project so far.
He said, “Of the 65 schools in the pilot phase, 23 are government schools of which seven of them are girls’ only schools, while two others are boys only.”
The pilot phase, which was unveiled to the public in November 2016, has delivered to the students critical life skills including basic computing, computational thinking and use of basic computer programming tools like Scratch and python over a period of eight weeks and the feedbacks have been inspiring.
The pilot phase of the project was supported by some of Nigeria’s leading corporate brands, including consulting firm PWC; SystemSpecs, the developers of Remita; foremost insurance firm, ARM Insurance; and the Lagos State Ministry of Science and Technology.
Speaking during a CodeLagos forum, one of the partners, SystemSpecs, represented by its Executive Director, Deremi Atanda, noted that partnering with the Ministry of Education for CodeLagos “demonstrates SystemSpecs’ interest in the youth segment of Lagos and Nigeria as a whole, as well as its support for the transformation of the economic and educational fortunes of Lagos state”.
Having taken vital lessons from the first phase of the project, the Lagos State governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has approved the implementation of the second phase, which will be launched in September 2017 and would include all state-owned public libraries to ensure access to more Lagosians especially those outside the conventional schools system. There would also be coding centres in tertiary institutions across the state.
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