GirlCode proves a primary school girl can grow into a software developer

GirlCode is showing that a girl who first meets a computer in a primary school classroom can end up employed as a software developer, CapeTown ETC reports. The organisation’s work traces that route from a child’s early curiosity about computers to a paid job in the field.

The point the report makes is that a girl’s first encounter with technology can decide whether a career in it ever becomes possible. Teach her the fundamentals while she is young and the door stays open. Leave her without that grounding and the same door tends to stay shut.

That is the gap GirlCode is working in. The report describes a journey with two ends, a child learning to write her first lines of code at one end and a working developer earning a salary at the other, and it argues that the distance between them is shorter when the start comes early.

For South African families the stakes are practical. Software development is paid work, it is done in offices and from home, and it does not require the kind of capital that keeps many young people out of other professions. A girl who can code has a skill she can carry into a job, a small business or further study.

The country’s technology sector has said for years that it needs more people who can build software. The report’s argument is that the supply does not begin at university. It begins in a classroom where a girl is handed a keyboard and told she belongs in front of it.

What the report does not set out is scale. It does not say how many girls GirlCode has taken through its programmes, how many have gone on to work in software, or what the organisation’s reach is across the country. Those numbers are not in the material, and this paper will not supply them.

What it does establish is the shape of the argument, and it is an argument worth testing against the record. Girls in South Africa’s schools sit in classrooms where computer access is uneven, where the teacher trained in technology is not always available, and where the expectation of what a girl should study still narrows the choices put in front of her. GirlCode’s answer is to start earlier than those pressures do.

The report’s framing is that of a pipeline. A curious child becomes a learner who can code, the learner becomes a student who chooses the field, and the student becomes a developer with a career. Each stage depends on the one before it, and the earliest stage is the one most easily lost.

That is where the organisation has put its effort, and it is where the public argument about South Africa’s skills shortage should be looking. A country that wants more software developers has to find them before they have decided what they are allowed to be good at.

CapeTown ETC’s report does not claim that GirlCode has solved the problem. It shows the model and the reasoning behind it, and leaves the reader with the question the model raises, which is how many girls in how many classrooms are still waiting for their first turn at a computer.

Source: CapeTown ETC, GirlCode and the push to bring South African girls into technology