“Female enrollment continues to decline progressively from the basic to the tertiary level of our education despite several international and local interventions such as the Education For All and many other interventions” Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition Report
Approximately 75% of girls throughout Ghana attend primary school, but there is a significant drop in the number of girls who attend secondary school and college. Our future growth relies on competitiveness, innovation and productivity, and these, in turn, depend on the education of our young girls who hold the destiny of our nations.
This gap can be bridged through the active development of females by introducing them to STEM-related programmes especially in the field of ICT. For this reason, DreamOval Foundation is introducing an initiative which encapsulates the aspirations of Ghana’s ICT plan for young girls under the working title, FemITI which means Females in Tech Initiative.
FemITI is a project to train young girls to develop problem-solving skills through coding and robotics to empower them to facilitate technology creation to generate opportunities for Societal Transformation and ensure inclusive and equitable quality education. The first edition of FemITI is done in partnership with SAP.
The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation. — Ray L. Wilbur, third president of Stanford University
DreamOval Junior Academy (DOJA) is an initiative birthed by DreamOval Foundation with the focus to harness the ingenuity of children to awaken a keen interest in technology.
On successful completion of our program, the students will be able to demonstrate proficiency in:
Mission
Inspire children between ages 8 and 17 with programming and technology skills.
Vision
Equip each child with the ability to identify problems, think logically to craft solutions by harnessing the latest technologies in the world.
Junior Academy is designed to run during the long vacation in order to ensure participants make the most out of the training. Each Saturday, over the period of the training, students are taken through an interactive four hour lesson which includes practicals to ensure they readily understand everything being taught. Each participant is given an assignment to take home and do over the week.
Over the years, participants have been trained in
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"By learning the new language of coding in an open, supportive environment, young Africans are able to take advantage of the immense opportunities presented by the digital revolution and become active players of the global economy." Claire Gillissen-Duval.
Africa Code Week is the story of hundreds of schools, teachers, governments, and nonprofits getting together to bridge the digital and gender skills gap in Africa. The goal of Africa Code Week is to empower the young generation by teaching the coding skills they need in order to thrive in the 21st century.
Africa has the largest and youngest workforce in the world, yet many companies present on the continent today are struggling to fill I.T. related positions with a local and qualified workforce. Currently, only one percent of African children leave school with basic coding skills. Africa Code Week aims to boost a continent-wide initiative to foster digital literacy, and to spark the interest of African children, teenagers, and young adults in software coding. Around 89,000 young people across 17 African countries received basic coding training during the inaugural Africa Code Week back in 2015. This number keeps growing, thus equipping more and more young people with skills they need to venture into software development and other related careers in the industry.
Africa Code Week has been running in Ghana since 2015 and is instilling digital literacy and coding skills in the young generation to drive sustainable digital learning skills across Ghana. The initiative was spearheaded by SAP as part of its social investments to drive sustainable growth in Africa.
A number of key global partners; UNESCO, Google and the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) support the initiative. In Ghana, the DreamOval Foundation in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service (GES) are at the forefront of ACW.
Students ultimately need direction from their teachers in order to learn to code. It is for this reason ACW is broadly divided into two: Train-The-Trainer and the ACW live training sessions which happen in August and October respectively. The Train-the-Trainer (TTT) sessions form a cornerstone of Africa Code Week’s sustainable impact across the continent by empowering teachers with skills and teaching materials that drive the advance of digital skills in the school curriculum.
In October, during Africa Code Week live sessions, thousands of free coding activities for youth aged between 8 to 16 are organised across all 36 participating African Countries. The ultimate goal is to ensure that in the near future, the best programmers will come from Africa. It’s a bold claim, but here is why: if it works here, it works everywhere. Africa has a myriad of challenges- power, bandwidth, cost of data, cost of infrastructure, intermittent connectivity, lack of foreign trust, etc. However, those challenges drive optimisations.
African codes are more efficient, more resilient, more secure, and more economical in power and data because they need to be more robust in our environments. It is also a very real and important skill. This is why locally-developed value will benefit the whole world. Therefore, in the very near future, African kids will take the world by storm.
Bridging the Digital Literacy divide one Teacher at a time.
The DreamOval Foundation, the leading pioneer with a solution to bridge the educational gap in ICT literacy had a vision of a Ghanaian society that appreciated and understood the importance and encompassing power of digital literacy. Our goal was to bring digital literacy to the deprived Ghanaian child in order to achieve exponential growth to reach more deprived children.
iTeach was developed as a way of bringing digital literacy to deprived communities by training teachers within these communities, encouraging and equiping them to transfer the knowledge to other colleagues and their students. The concept is to reach teachers from these deprived areas with basic computer skills so they transfer this knowledge.
Objectives
Since the inception of iTeach in 2010, iTeach has hosted teachers from the Greater Accra, Central, Ashanti, Eastern, Northern and Western Regions. Over the period, majority of the teachers that attend iTeach have very little or no knowledge of ICT yet they leave enriched with a wealth of knowledge that they use to enhance their teaching methods and to inspire their students and colleagues in their various schools and communities at large.
In hosting iTeach, the DreamOval Foundation has worked with a number of organisations namely;
Impact
DOTTS works to share that vision to DO with the outside world through a series of open and frank discussions.
The DreamOval Thoughts Transfer Series is a monthly forum that focuses on inspiring and nurturing young minds to do. We seek to bridge the knowledge gap through sharing of thought via conversation and participation. This concept stems from our core principles upon which the DreamOval Foundation was founded: Knowledge creation, Sharing and utilization.
DOTTS invites a special guest each month from varying walks of life to speak on their work or life experiences as well as their field of expertise. We believe that in every area of work and of thought, there is wisdom to be gained by the whole.
Over the years, DOTTS has hosted prominent speakers such as;
DOTTS is a free event open to the public.Over the years, the event has evolved from a month’s event to a quarter’s event. To be a part of the next DOTTs event, fill the form below.