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Expanding professional opportunities through digital skills

27.01.2023

In December 2022, 40 young people from the Masina neighbourhood (DRC) had the opportunity to take part in a free coding workshop at the Don Bosco Centre. This was an opportunity for them to learn two languages of code and, above all, to create their own web page in partnership with Enabel and Kinshasa Digital Academy.

A springboard to new professional opportunities that seem to make sense in a fast-developing world requiring more and more skills from young people wanting to enter the job market.

Why Masina?

Firstly, the Don Bosco centre is one of the 7 centres that have benefited from the renovation of a computer classroom. This new room is therefore an opportunity for the students to learn new tools and to benefit from a qualitative material in the learning of digital tools.

Secondly, Masina has a special status in the capital of Kinshasa, as Cedrick Ngandu Kalala, Enabel's digital development expert, explains:

"We had noticed that there are a good number of activities and actors that are concentrated in the Gombe (commune of Kinshasa) and there are, therefore, more young people from these surroundings who can benefit from digital skills training. That is why we chose to come to another densely populated commune that tends to be considered disadvantaged. Thanks to the recent renovation of the classroom, we have created a favorable environment for training. In addition, with the support of Kinshasa Digital Academy for the development of the workshop, we have offered the young people of Masina this opportunity of which we are very proud.

What happens next?

During the different modules, the participants learned and applied the notions of HTML and CSS allowing to create websites. If at the end of this week, it is obvious that the young people do not graduate directly, Cedrick Ngandu explains that the underlying objective is elsewhere:

"In fact, our idea was already to arouse interest among the young people of the commune, to demystify what coding is and then to enable them to learn by themselves and offering, if they want to join other coding academies. I'm convinced that if some of them are very interested, they can become very good coders.”

Dive into the atmosphere of this week through our aftermovie : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpuyWW6gFwQ