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Technology is the answer to creating sustainable employment opportunities for the youth.
And a chance meeting between Athlone police officers and staff of a local training organisation, created the way for 180 Grade 8 and 9 learners at Ned Doman High School to be one step closer to that.
Techways has partnered with South African Fintech company Ozow to offer free training to the learners, with the end-goal of having them skilled in code and web development.
Athlone Police Station youth-desk coordinator and spokesperson Sgt Zita Norman said the station identified the school as a pilot for this programme, as all the junior commissioners from the station attended school there.
Joanne Brink, CEO of Techways, said the partnership with Ozow was exciting because exposing children to digital development at a young age was important.
“The end goal is that they create real products that can even be shared on Playstore [the electronic facility for apps]. By next year they can go on to build a mobile app, game or build a website,” she says.
They first visited the school to establish the programme last year.
While they offer more intense and advanced training to more privileged schools in a position to pay for the skills development in the cyber and technology space, they had needed to start from scratch with more basic level training at this school. The end goal remains being able to write code, create apps and work in the technological space following the year-long programme.
The learners are later also exposed to remote employment platforms to market their skills as web and app developers.
Glenda Johnston, deputy principal at the school, says the school is always lucky when searching for pilot projects.
“We are pleased that you have taken us on board,” she says. “We often take for granted that our children and parents have and know. A little thing like copy and paste on Microsoft, we take for granted that they know this. It is amazing to see how they light up learning these things.”
The children now have email accounts and have started working on Word. They will soon move on to Excel, with the end goal of learning the computer language Python.
Adam Fairall, Business Solutions Manager at Ozow says this forms part of the company’s CSI outreach, with the hope of creating remote international employment opportunities for South African youth.
“This allows our South African youth to get remote opportunities that pay in Dollars, Euros and Pounds, and that indirectly uplifts the community. These are skills that are attractive to the international market. Learning to code, web development, app development all these skills are crucial, even data management - data is the new oil,” he says.
More than 7 000 learners have come through the Techways programme at various levels.
Norman says working with several schools in the community, it became clear that this school needed computer skills.
“At this school, the passion the children have in partnering with the police, they also informed us of their needs and one was to learn more computer skills. Their parents are not fortunate enough to provide them with the technology, so this programme was brilliant,” she says.
“The end goal is to create employment and we are hoping to ensure all Grade 8s and 9s are educated in this programme, but also thinking of taking this to all schools that there is a need in the precinct.”
Athlone Police Station commander Col Junaid Alcock says investing in youth fights crime.
“Investing in technology takes their mindsets away from creating mischief at school. If you have something to look forward to - even with computers, if you tell someone to go work on a computer, they don’t know they must first switch it on. Children know cellphones, but computers are different. If you don’t know the basics of computer literacy, you will be lost,” he says.
Computers have access to information and opportunities, he says.
“Our youth in Athlone need this kind of intervention at schools. There [are a lot of criminal activities happening at schools and it messes up our children’s mindsets of what they want to do at school. Our Grade 8s and 9s, we become mentors to them and through this programme, it excels them to the job market.”
Employment is key to fighting crime and these programmes aid in keeping youth occupied with positive activities and future opportunities, he says.
