Speaker
Description
In this talk I'll be sharing my journey of starting a non-profit organization in Zimbabwe that teaches girls how to code. When I initially started trying to teach girls how to code, I started in the city and shared primarily with young women who were from fairly well off families. After some time I decided I wanted to help girls who were in areas of Harare that were underserved. I was surprised to see how little access the girls had to computers and decided to fundraise to get them some laptops. We initially started out with old laptops that had very little storage space and would crash easily. Puppy Linux, based on Ubuntu, was a great way to get around some of these problems and also had a friendly interface for the young women using laptops for the first time. I'll share about this and other thoughts on how to help developers in areas of the world with less access to resources.'
Session author bios
Marlene is a Zimbabwean software engineer, explorer, and speaker based in the city of Harare. She is a the previous vice-chair of the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors and is currently working as a Developer Advocate at Voltron Data. In 2017, she co-founded ZimboPy, a non-profit organization that gives Zimbabwean young women access to resources in the field of technology. She is also the previous chair of PyCon Africa and is an advocate for women in tech on the continent.
| Social Media | marlene_zw |
|---|---|
| Level of Difficulty | Beginner |