As the digital era continues to accelerate, the future of the workplace and future skills required are also quickly changing. In this era, coding is the most basic skill to possess. Coding improves communication skills - verbal and written, fosters problem solving and creative thinking.

To ensure that children are prepared for the future workplace with equivalent skill sets, the Government of Rwanda with partners is conducting a national coding program, dubbed ‘Coding Bootcamp’ to introduce teenage students to basic coding skills during school holidays.

Interacting with the Children, The Minister of ICT and Innovation; Paula Ingabire, urged them to be agents of change.

“You should skills acquired here to change your communities.  Use this learning as agents of change by developing solutions for your schools and communities.”

Through the Future Skills bootcamp, Rwanda has a vision to become a continental prize winning, hinged on other international technology events and some of the benefits of the program include stimulating student mindsets to embrace coding as a future career, providing a platform for students to learn other computational skills; cultivating mathematical intuition; logical thinking, for problem solving and empowering students to excel other STEM fields.

In September 2019, the MINICT conducted a pilot phase hosted by Green Hills Academy and 50 students participated from various schools around Kigali. They underwent an intensive training in software programing with basics like HTML, Java script and CSS, and concluded the program by each student designing their own web page within 7 days.news detail

This time round, 350 students are attending the two-week program which will take place across eight (8) campuses in Kigali and beyond and will conclude with each student presenting their final project on demo day. The Campuses are: SOS High School, African Leadership University (ALU), IPRC Kicukiro, IFAK High School, IPRC North (Tumba and Rulindo), University of Tourism Technology and Business Studies (UTB) and Adventist University of Central Africa (AUCA).