A Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), E-Health Academy (EHA) has graduated its 4th cohort of fellows who received free training and mentorships on software engineering in Kano.
The NGO, which is a subsidiary of E-Health Africa, said the fellowship is in their efforts to bridge the gap in the Information Communication Technology (ICT), especially in the area of software engineering.
Speaking during the graduation ceremony, Senior Manager Software Engineering Unit and lead for the implementation of EHA Academy, Jamil Galadanci said the 10-week intensive program is offered to underprivileged youth to provide them with the skills and resources necessary to succeed in the technology industry.
According to him, the graduation ceremony will mark the end of the classroom sessions and the beginning of the internship program for successful graduates.
“The program, offered at no cost, targeted high school students and young unemployed graduates from low-income communities and trained them in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The academy has so far graduated 155 students and some of them were recruited to work in the academy.
“The whole idea of this academy is to bridge the gap of software engineers that we have in the space. We have realized that over the years that getting qualified software engineers that have the practical skills is always a challenge. That is why we came up with this academy.
“Our hope in the future is to have this getting bigger so that we can be able to have over 100 participants at a time considering the needs to have software engineers across Africa. Our biggest hope is to see those participants coming back as mentors coming back to be mentors just like we have started seeing now.”
Speaking shortly after the ceremony, one of the students, Aisha Mujahid Kabir, who just graduated from secondary school and willing to study computer engineering, said the training has opened her eyes into the field and that she is motivated to do more.
She added that “I am passionate about this and I am happy to say that now I am a web developer. I learned it through this Academy and I really appreciate them. I’m very sure that I can depend on what I learned here.”
