Connected African Girls Coding Camp — AI, Robotics & IoT Skills for Young Women in Windhoek, Namibia

In August 2022, Windhoek's Palm Hotel hosted the fifth edition of the Connected African Girls Coding Camp (part of the UN Women/African Union/ITU ‘African Girls Can Code Initiative’, AGCCI) — the first time the two-week programme was held in Namibia. Roughly 100 Namibian girls and young women aged 12–25 attended in person, joined by close to 2,000 more following remotely from across the African continent, with instruction delivered in both English and French.

Participants rotated through four core workshops — animation, web development and gaming, IoT and robotics, and 3D printing — alongside supplementary courses on graphic design linked to artificial intelligence, design thinking and computational thinking. Master classes covered the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the African Union's Agenda 2063, and gender-based violence awareness. The camp closed with an innovation fair where participants presented original prototypes; across the four editions preceding Namibia's, AGCCI cohorts had produced 198 such projects, 40 of which were recognised for community impact.

The camp was organised by the UN Economic Commission for Africa together with UN Women, the International Telecommunication Union, Namibia's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, and Telecom Namibia. It responds to a well-documented digital gender gap: an ITU 2021 report found only 24% of African women used the internet, against 35% of men. As with other AGCCI camps, publicly available reporting covers attendance, curriculum and output counts, but no independent post-camp evaluation of skills retention or downstream employment outcomes for the Namibian cohort has been published.

Read the full analysis: https://namibia.un.org/en/196946-connected-african-girls-coding-camp-brings-ict-skills-namibian-girls