Django Girls Kampala Workshop at Makerere University School of Public Health ResilientAfrica Network (RAN) Innovation Space
On Saturday 21st November, 2015, Django Girls Kampala in partnership with the ResilientAfrica Network (RAN) www.ranlan.org and Python Software Foundation hosted a Django Girls Kampala Workshop at the RAN Innovation space. The workshop was initiated by an installation party that had been held on the eve of the workshop to help participants in setting up their development environments.
For the longest time in history, men have dominated web apps development, however, through the current girl empowerment system; many girls have emerged to learn to code with the programming languages. Django is one of those organizations that have come up to teach and train girls to become the next generation coders.
With a good turn up of 25 participants, (24 females and 1 male) of whom 7 were coaches, it was a rich knowledge generation, sharing and networking opportunity for girls who have the passion to become coders. Participants were engaged in a hands-on practical session working in groups of three under the mentorship of a coach. These worked through the Django tutorials on how to create a blog application from scratch to the deployment stage. Through this engagement, the girls successfully completed studying a module d on the use of Django and were also equipped with programming skills as they were introduced to the Python and the Django web framework. The skill of web programming is used to build websites and get hired by tech companies or create their own startups.
Dr. Dorothy the RAN Director of Innovations shared about the RAN4Gals project which is a program currently under the RAN Eastern Africa Resilience Innovation Lab, developed specifically to increase female participation in building innovations for community development. In her remarks, she informed participants that the 2016 Technovation Challenge was soon being shared and further encouraged the ladies to actively participate in developing solutions to respond to community developmental challenges.
As the workshop drew to an end, one group successfully finished the tutorial process and three groups were able to deploy their application to Python Anywhere (www.pythonanywhere.com). A lot of prizes in form of gifts like stickers, capes and wristbands were shared in order to further motivate the participants.
Django Girls Kampala is a non-profit organization that empowers and helps women to organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and support to ensure that the workshops are successfully implemented. The Django Girls programme appreciates the work RAN is doing in relation to supporting females, science and technology, development and provision of solutions through innovation in addition to the collaboration with Technovation Challenge and the team looks forward to a potential vibrant and strong partnership with RAN.
To learn more about Django, follow updates shared here: http://djangogirls.org/kampala https://twitter.com/djangogirlskla
More photos shared here
https://goo.gl/photos/7WGr8MdMhJwRaBt38
