Only 5% of South African schools offer computer science with majority of them being in affluent schools leaving the poor majority of poor children out. The main reason is the lack of qualified IT teachers in disadvantaged schools. Africa Teen Geeks is looking to change this by training high potential unemployed youth and placing them in poor schools to introduce computer science closing the opportunity gap where access to technology education for poor kids.
• In 2014, the Department of Labour declared IT as a scarce and critical skill and opened its borders to migrants to help fill the shortage of qualified IT professionals.
• Despite the introduction of a national IT curriculum by the DBE in 2012, it’s estimated that only less than 5% of schools nationally offer IT as a subject and less than 1% of matric students take IT as a subject. In its 2015 IT profile report, the DBE highlighted the following critical problems:
– The participation rate in IT is extremely low and declining: only 0.9% of Grade 12 (~5K out of 535K) learners took IT as a subject; 29% less learners took IT in 2014 than in 2008
– IT is dominated by boy learners: only about 26% of learners in IT are girls
– High dropout rates from Grade 10 to Grade 12
• According to the DBE, the extremely low participation and high dropout rates are because:
– Learners perceive IT as being too technical or requiring high-level of maths skills
– IT teachers are very scarce and many IT teachers have no formal IT qualification
– IT is a resource intensive, expensive subject that is mostly offered by affluent schools.
The Africa Teen Geeks is a non-profit organization that is working hard to close the opportunity gap in computer science education for disadvantaged children by removing financial barriers and increasing access to quality tech education. Africa Teen Geeks runs after-school and Saturday classes in 96 centres nationally. These centres are based in suburbs making it difficult for poor children to attend due to lack of transport and lunch for Saturday classes. The fund is aimed will cover the following:
· Train teachers at township schools with computer labs but are unused due to lack of qualified teachers
· Provide transport and lunch for Saturday classes for township children
Individuals and companies can support Africa Teen Geeks by sponsoring a child.
Sponsorship options
· R5250: Sponsor a child for a year (35 Saturdays)
· R750: Sponsors a child for week to attend computer science week (3-7 July 2017 at UNISA labs nationally)
· R150: sponsors a child for day
Tipping Point (R30 000): R30,000 will enable us to provide transport and lunch for 200 kids who will be introduced to basic coding and giving them access to the important digital skills critical to success in the 21st centuary.
Dream funding Goal(R1 000 000) : The R1 000,000 will enable us to reach 190,000 children through our Saturday classes. This will ensure that these kids gets skills that are relevant to the market and give them a chance to break the cycle of disadvantage. Currently we are only able to use 10% of the facilities available to us because of lack of funding to pay facilitators and also the kids themselves can’t come due to lack of transport.
We are the on the ground team implementing Africa Teen Geeks programmes. This picture was taken at an event sponsored by the Mpumalanga provincial government where we launched coding classes in 10 schools in the province.