Meet and Code

Meet and Code introduces children and young people aged 8-24 to technology and coding through events held during EU Code Week, with up to €500 seed funding per event. Non-profit organisations can apply for funding up to four months before Code Week, so as to reach small, locally anchored "grassroots" organisations that would otherwise lack the resources to run coding activities.

Help young people build digital skills and see how coding can bring ideas to life, while empowering small, newly formed non-profit organisations to deliver programming and digital-education activities.

In 2018, its second year, the initiative funded hackathons, coding workshops, competitions, coding nights and robotics classes across 22 countries, run by 1,100 supported non-profit organisations, alongside private individuals and SAP employee volunteering.

Participating non-profits reported that without Meet and Code funding, more than 50% of events could not have taken place at all, and a further ~40% would have run at a much smaller scale. Of the roughly 50,000 participants reached, 40% were female, and participation grew across successive years of the programme.

Feedback from funded organisations indicates the seed-funding model is an effective way to enable locally-led coding events that otherwise would not happen or would be much smaller, though these are self-reported figures from participating non-profits rather than an independent evaluation.