The WAAW She Hacks Africa coding Boot camp with Entrepreneurship and Leadership training program (Cohort 10), sponsored by Aspire Coronation Trust Foundation, ACT Foundation started on the 20th of May with participants looking bright and highly expectant of what the following twenty days would bring, and as expected and even beyond, it was a great and impactful experience for both the participants and facilitators.
First Day of the boot camp regardless of the rain participants still showed up as we expected. Everyday of the week starts off with lots of fun and activities.
Participants got introduced to icebreakers. An activity/game that is used to welcome and warm up the conversation among participants. They were also introduced to the boot camp officially were participants had to introduce themselves and further enlightened about the WAAW Foundation and its collaboration with ACT Foundation. They were also allowed to make rules for themselves.
On the first day they were taught how the internet works and also had an Entrepreneurship session. During the course of the Boot camp they were introduced into HTML, CSS Bootstrap JQuery, JavaScript, Cyber Security, Mobile Development, MySQL and PHP. Participants were divided into 6 teams which they maintained throughout the coding boot camp. Each group was expected to come up with a business idea that would solve a problem in their environment. Every Friday of the week they do project presentations and the facilitators who act as judges do a review and give feedbacks on every project. They always had icebreakers in between classes just to keep them relaxed and get back on track. How interesting! Light lunch was also provided every day for each participant.
In the third week participants were already acquainted with themselves and the project they had at hand. She Hacks Coding Boot camp doesn’t only focus on coding it also combines with Entrepreneurship , Leadership Skills, Business management, Design thinking and effective pitching which were delivered by one of the SHA facilitators and professionals from Leap Africa. They also had guests come around to inspire them. They had the opportunity to meet with Mr Bankole Oloruntoba, the CEO of Nigeria Climate Innovation Center. He had a thought provoking sessions with the participants were he shared his personal and professional insight on the sustainability and things to expect of starts up. He also had a one on one interaction with each groups and he gave them constructive feedbacks on their projects.
The final day of the boot camp tagged She Hacks Africa pitch and career day. Emeka Okoye CEO of Cymantiks Nigeria limited, Hilda Awomolo Head of Content at She Leads Africa, Ayodeji Ojo the Program Officer at ACT Foundation and Florence Okosun a Software Engineer at Showclix were the Judges at this event. Participants websites were judged and graded based on their website appearance, user friendliness and functionality. The business plan, business model canvas and overall presentation were other criteria used to judge each groups. Team connectif emerged as the winner and won the grant to kick-start their project. Other teams were encouraged to keep up and continue with their project as their idea may be the next big thing in Nigeria and that they could get funded by other organizations. It was a great and memorable day for everyone. We would miss Cohort 10 and we hope to see them doing great things.
