Budding developers jostle for Google’s new African Developer Scholarships

By Omobayo Azeez

Google Africa has announced the third edition of its African Developer Scholarships, igniting a race among budding software developers in the continent.

Google said in a recent announcement that the initiative remains part of its commitment to create skills and economic opportunities for Africa.

It builds on its five-year engagement to help bridge the developer skills and opportunities gap in Africa by providing 100,000 African developers with access to high-quality, world-class training on mobile technologies and Cloud platforms.

In the statement, Google added: “Today, we are announcing an additional 30,000 training scholarship opportunities and a further 1,000 grants for the Google Associate Android Developer and Associate Cloud Engineer certifications.”

It said the training will be delivered by its partners, Pluralsight and Andela, through an intensive curriculum designed to prepare learners for entry-level and intermediate roles as software developers.

The statement further red, “Across Africa we continue to see developers who have successfully gone through the scholarship program grow their careers and also use their skills to benefit their communities. Boutheina Bouchahda, a middle-school teacher from Tunisia, went through the training program last year and is building an application for her students to teach them how to program.

“Boutheina credits the scholarship program for her skills and confidence growth. Ayeah Godlove Akoni from Cameroon completed the web development skills track and immediately got a job as a web developer. He is also one of the 1,000 developers across Africa who qualified for the developer certification grants.”

The digital technology giant stated that throughout this journey, “we have seen the value of peer-to-peer learning as a catalyst for deeper learning thanks to the in-person meetups facilitated by our community leads in multiple cities across Africa.

“Developers accepted into the scholarship will gain access to our network of over 250 Google Developer Groups and Developer Student Clubs in 150 cities across Africa.”

It added that this connection to communities focused on Google technologies will provide access to extra skills and help inspire the next generation of software developers in Africa.