Connected African Girls Coding Camp — Robotics, IoT & AI Bootcamp in Niamey, Niger

The seventh edition of the Connected African Girls Coding Camp — part of the UN Women/African Union/ITU ‘African Girls Can Code Initiative’ (AGCCI) — concluded on 1 March 2023 at the Palais des Congrès in Niamey, Niger, after an eight-day intensive bootcamp hosted at Niger's Higher School of Telecommunications. 108 young women and girls aged 17–25 attended in person, with roughly 4,500 more participating virtually from across Africa.

Training covered five workshop tracks — robotics, IoT and artificial intelligence, Scratch programming, web development, and 3D printing, alongside the block-based tool Turtle Stitch. The bootcamp closed with a two-day innovation fair at which participants presented 23 prototypes addressing local problems, including solar-powered water pumps, soil-fertility tools and medical-device concepts; a judging panel selected 7 projects and 33 trainees for awards.

The camp was organised by the UN Economic Commission for Africa's West Africa Sub-Regional Office with UN Women, the International Telecommunication Union, and Niger's Ministry of Posts and New Information Technologies. AGCCI organisers report that more than 25,000 trainees had passed through the initiative's first six editions across its target countries, with a stated goal of reaching 100,000 young African women by 2025. As with other AGCCI reporting, published figures cover attendance, curriculum content and award outcomes, but no independent evaluation of participants' longer-term skills retention, further study, or employment has been published for the Niamey cohort.

Read the full analysis: https://www.uneca.org/stories/successful-conclusion-of-the-7th-edition-of-the-connected-african-girls-coding-camp-in