Coders of Colour

As a young founder passionate about having a positive impact on as many people as possible, such a prize along with the recognition will enable Coders of Colour to effectively scale our work and by proxy our impact. Although the financial prize will be beneficial, the two years of support including mentorship and amplification of our work is exactly what we need at this point in time.

After convincing my parents to allow me to pursue Computer Science, I started to teach myself to code from the age of 13. By age 17 I had attended several hackathons where I was the only Black woman in the room. After attending a hackathon for young people, I realised that the lack of young Black people in Computing is a systemic problem and it needs to change. I started Coders of Colour to teach young people who are like who I was at age 13, new to coding and in need of resources and direction. I have now impacted over 1000 young people with my work and will be pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University. I hope to not only continue to have impact on young people, but through my research on Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource languages, give as many people as possible equal access to technology in their language.

According to recent statistics, 80-90% of the tech industry's workforce is either White or Asian. This means every other ethnic group combined has only a 10-20% representation in the industry.

Coders of Colour is an organisation aiming to: “Empower and enable young underrepresented people of colour to pursue a career in tech by providing a safe space for them to learn, explore and grow”. Our principal aim is to give underrepresented teens of colour the capability to choose if they want to enter the technology industry.

We do this by running free coding workshops for young people. This includes summer workshops, one-off events, CV tailoring and more. We have a hands-on approach allowing all attendees to leave with the ability to achieve something new.

The pandemic has led to many of the young people we meet and their families not having access to laptops and broadband. From 2020, we have pledged to tackle the Digital Divide, donating laptops and covering the cost of broadband for those that need it the most.

Our approach is running programmes that work for young people. They introduce them to new technologies and allow them to build something tangible.

During the summer of 2018, we held a five-week summer programme. By the end of the programme, young people aged 12-25 had received an introduction to GitHub and APIs, User Experience and User Interface Design, the React framework by actual React engineers, Augmented Reality and Machine Learning.

In August 2019 we ran a two-week programme giving 10 young people the skills to build mobile applications. They learnt HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the Ionic Framework. The winner built a 'LinkedIn for teens' app from scratch. Only one young person could code before the start of the programme, but by the end, they had all built mobile apps. Through our summer programme in 2019, we gave the young people an opportunity to learn not only digital skills, but practise public speaking. 

In 2020, amongst other programmes, we ran a Web Development course where students directly applied their skills to build sites for charity.

Our programmes not only hone in on a particular skill, they give young people a chance to master the skill and gain confidence in their ability.

In the last few years we have not only inspired young people to pursue further education in Computing, but have helped two young black women transition into and level up in tech, leading to a total of $120 000 in pay increase. We are also providing all-round personal development of young people giving them confidence in their craft and public speaking skills as they present their projects at our showcases. By getting past students to be Teaching Assistants on new programmes, they build confidence in their ability to share their skills and impart knowledge. All these measures combined has enabled us to build a supportive community of young people, scaling our impact immensely.