Africa Code Week: Raising Africa’s Next Generation Skilled Workforce

The Africa Code Week (ACW) initiative has succeeded in less than half the time on its initial targets of introducing digital literacy to African children and youths. With an original 10-year vision (2015-2025) to introduce 5 million African youth to ICT and coding, it neared the target in 2018 having trained over 4.1 million youth. Analyzing how the project has been able to achieve this lofty target is one essential part of this paper. The project core values and how it has been adapted across constituents is discussed. A closer look into some of the events and how it was organized serves as sample case study. The outlook of ACW and how it established various sustainable pattern of engagement forms the third part of the paper which includes the public private partnership in place that effectively helped to drive the project and the importance of accelerating 21st century skill development in traditional school system through effective collaboration. Also discussed is how the concept of mass education can help drive the skills ecosystem in Africa taking a cue from the project; and the necessity of shifting unproductive education policies to accommodate innovation, creativity and growth in the Digital Economy. The initiative was designed with educators and school leaders’ inclusion which partly helped laid the groundwork for sustenance. Finally, this paper recommends as a value proposition the pattern established to be used for other wide ranging initiatives on the continent and elsewhere to build the much needed skilled workforce of the future.