CodeGirls has completed one year of imparting coding and business skills education to young women. With its third graduation ceremony, held at 10Pearls University, CodeGirls graduated 85 participants from the fourth cohort (Phase 1) and 52 participants in the first cohort (Phase 2).
CodeGirls is a community-funded coding and business skills boot camp, designed for girls and women. The program runs in multiple phases, changing 220 lives every four months. CodeGirls is run by ConsulNet Corporation, in partnership with United Global Initiative and WomenInTechPK along with their various local and international sponsors. CodeGirls has enrolled 514 participants in one year, out of which 411 young women have graduated. 100 of these women are mothers.
The graduation ceremony was attended by the boot camp participants, trainers, mentors, sponsors, organizers, community leaders and friends of the program. Founder Consulnet Corporation & COO Genetech Solutions, Shamim Rajani shared the lessons of running the CodeGirls bootcamp.
“It is when women bear children, that most of them realize that in order to provide quality education and upbringing to their children, they need to be an equalizer in the family. This is needed today more than ever, given the amount of inflation rate and the economic crisis in Pakistan. ”
The program has a 80 percent success rate, being supported by the Executive Director United Global Initiative Hasnain Bhai Walji, Co-Founder CodeGirls Faiza Yousuf, the Genetech Solutions’ administrative team including trainers and mentors from the local tech ecosystem.
Hasnain Walji shared that almost half of the enrolled participants have a family income below PKR 50,000, whereas, after the completion of boot camp, these participants successfully secured internships and job ranging between PKR 10,000 to PKR 40,000. He expressed gratitude towards the organizations who provided internship and employment opportunities to the CodeGirls alumni.
Out of 120 enrolled participants in the fourth cohort, 87 were retained, and 85 completed the training successfully. The top 10 participants of Cohort 4 (Phase 1) received a brand new laptop and a tablet, while the top 5 participants of Cohort 1 (Phase 2) received a new tablet.
Three of the alumni also shared their experience of learning how to code and then finding their footing in the reputable software houses to inspire the graduating batch. Mariam Mobin shared her experience of CodeGirls and how she made it to 10Pearls as an intern for UI/UX Engineering at the software house. Filza Mujtaba shared about managing studies and the bootcamp and gave insight on how the non-tech training of CodeGirls also had a major impact on her. She also successfully secured an internship at Contour Software. Sana Fatima, a mother of two, was able to find a remote job with a software services company in Zurich.
At the end of each cohort, participants have to work together to make group projects and they are graded based on their performance in the team project as well as class participation and individual viva. This time, top 2 project teams from Cohort 4 (Phase 1) and top 3 project teams from Cohort 1 (Phase 2) presented their work to the audience. The projects were related to website and game development, made using web technologies, WordPress, PHP, and NodeJS.
CodeGirls assessment report can be found here. The program is currently accepting applications for Phase 1 and 2 of their program.
