Opening Opportunities

Opening Opportunities addresses the digital divide in Romania's poorer regions, where many schools and young people have limited access to high-quality IT education, particularly in rural versus urban areas.

To give high-school students (aged 15–18) who lack access to technology creation opportunities a first meaningful encounter with app-building, learning computer science by doing while building mentoring relationships with IT-industry professionals.

IT-industry mentors worked directly with teams of high schoolers to build tech products, through more than 100 local events including public-library and school visits, computer-science webinars and Hour of Code sessions, delivered in partnership with the National Association of Librarians and Public Libraries of Romania (ANBPR) and funded by Microsoft Romania's YouthSpark initiative.

Across four editions since 2013, the programme reports reaching more than 7,000 high-school students through 100+ local events, mentoring 1,700 students (half of them female) with the support of 150 mentors, and enabling the development of 50+ technology projects by participating students.

The programme's own account credits it with winning the European Digital Skills Award 2017 (Digital Skills in Education category) and sustaining outreach to underserved regions over multiple editions, though these figures are self-reported and no independent evaluation report is cited.