SAP Africa Code Week launches in Ghana...appoints new head of education

The 2017 edition of Africa Code Week (ACW) arrived in Ghana this week with a series of Train-The-Trainer (TTT) workshops that took place.

Jointly organised by SAP, Dreamoval and the Ghana Education Service in Accra and Kumasi, these workshops are equipping local parents, teachers and educators with the coding skills and teaching materials they need to train children and youth in their immediate communities.

Africa Code Week was started in 2015 by SAP Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) EMEA together with public and private sector partners, with a long-term goal of empowering more than 200 000 teachers and positively impact the lives of 5 million children and youth within the next 10 years.

With over half a million young Africans introduced to coding across 30 countries so far, Africa Code Week key partners (SAP, UNESCO YouthMobile, the Cape Town Science Centre and the Galway Education Centre) have set new ambitious goals for 2017: impact the lives of 500 000 youth across 35 African countries over the course of an eight-day period from 18 to 25 October.

Ghana joined Africa Code Week in 2015, engaging 730 children and youth in the first year. Last year, the Dreamoval Foundation became the implementing partner for ACW in Ghana: with their support, 590 teachers were trained as part of the Train-the-Trainer sessions and an astounding 51 710 children and youth engaged in October 2016 – 56% of which were girls. Dreamoval will be, once again, the Implementing Partner for Africa Code Week 2017 in Ghana.

We have set ourselves the target of training 800 teachers this week and 150 000 young Ghanaians from October 18- 25,” says Francis Ahene-Affoh, head of business development and marketing at Dreamoval.

Train-The-Trainer workshops were held at the GNAT Hall at the Accra Polytechnic in Kumasi, with Ghana’s Deputy Minister of Education, Barbara Ayisi Acher, attending the launch. The Africa Code Week delegation also met with several Ghanaian dignitaries during the course of this training week, including Ghana Vice President His Excellency Dr Mahamudu Bamumia. For Vice President Bamumia, who has assured his full support to the initiative, “Africa Code Week is a powerful leverage for the public sector to wide-spread digital literacy on a nation-wide scale.”

According to Claire Gillissen-Duval, Director of EMEA Corporate Social Responsibility at SAP and Global Lead for Africa Code Week: “The initiative’s effectiveness in empowering the next generation of Digital Economy workers in Ghana requires knowledgeable instructors who are able to provide mentorship and skills transfer to participating youngsters.”

In a related development, SAP Africa has announced the appointment of a top executive to lead digital transformation education across the African continent. SAP Africa announced the appointment of Goutam Dev as its new Head of Education for Africa.

The newly appointed executive has been with the enterprise services company since 2005. He has held various leadership roles in services, sales, strategy, and general management across a range of geographies.

According to SAP Education, they position themselves as the world's largest IT education provider and a recognised market leader by successfully delivering customer and partner enablement. Noteworthy, Dev regards the digital skills gap as one of the top barriers to digital transformation among SAP Africa’s customers and partners.

“As a business, it is our stated objective to help companies with their digital transformation initiatives. By combining SAP's broad range of knowledge offerings in both a classroom and digital setting, we aim to focus on driving a comprehensive, rapid, and easy-to-consume learning and enablement strategy, which we see as being key to our customers' success and growth in Africa. Further, by extending the reach of enablement across the continent, we are able to unlock the tremendous growth potential in Africa, which is the largest market for SAP Education in the EMEA region", says Dev.

Dev has previously served in an executive role as the Chief of Staff to the Office of the SAP Africa CEO where he was tasked with the execution and strategic decisions of the CEO across all lines of business and also across 54 African countries.