₦airaland Forum

Frank Cohen is the President of SAP for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He was in Nigeria recently to evangelize potentials of SAP African Code Week aimed to train kids on software coding. According to him, SAP in the initiative will train 20,000 youths across eleven countries in Africa by the end of the programme.

African Code Week:

African Code week is a big initiative of SAP launched for for Africa and SAP as an organization realized early that there is skill shortage in Africa and that for children to be able to compete in future global economy, they need to have a basic knowledge of computing, because anywhere you look now, you have codes.

Target age:

Those we are targeting are between the ages of 9 and 24 because we want to catch them young and provide them with basic life skills.

Currently, the population of African youths between the ages of 15 and 25 is 200 million and this will double to 400 million by 2045. Africa has the largest youth population in the whole world.

We realized this and decided to tackle it headlong. This prompted us to launch the African Code Week to train kids on coding, which is the main objective of the African Code Week. We want to train 20,000 youths across 11 countries in Africa by the end of the programme. The pilot program was in South Africa.

Equipping schools with Computer Lab

This is just the beginning. I will say to you on a note of caution that it is practically impossible for SAP to be able to provide laptops for every student in Nigeria. We are only evangelists. We saw that there was a gap and saw a need to plug that gap, and we expect other well-meaning organisations to join in the movement. This is just the beginning, we will also expect the government to see this initiative as a ground breaking one that point to a gap that needs to be filled.

Investment in African Code week

It is a lot of money. The pilot in South Africa was massive and to put this together as you see it here is a lot of money. We are catering for the kids, we are giving them resources, we are creating an open platform for them to use, and we will train the teachers and the kids. We have done so much and a lot of money has gone into this. Also, SAP employees have volunteered their time for this code week. So, we are using our resources to drive this programme.

Number of schools in Nigeria to benefit

What we will be doing after the pilot is to scale out. On sustenance, we have created an online course free of charge for teachers and kids. Everybody and anybody can go online and do the course free of charge. This is a lot of investment on behalf of SAP.

Effect of digital revolution in Africa

I think there is no doubt that this world is becoming digital. Every day, we see news that cars will not need drivers any-more by 2025. I think it is absolutely great that Africa is participating in this digital revolution because this is where the world is going.

The current situation is that people with technical know how are coming from other continent to take jobs in Africa, while we have Africans who are jobless. We don’t need to ask people from Europe or India to come and do the job. So Code Week is a very nice thing. Our estimation is that 5 years from now, we will need additional 35,000 centres in Africa just to do the work effectively.

Lessons from pilot programme in South Africa

The pilot in South Africa was well-embraced. With coding, you don’t lose anything, you gain everything. In South Africa, they embraced the programme. If the pilot wasn’t successful, we won’t be here today.

Where do you go from here?

Where we go from here is that the main event happens first in 10th October,2015 And secondly, we have already created an online platform where you can log on to get coding skills. In October, we will roll this programme across 11 countries.

SAP’s strategic directions for Africa

Our SME development programme is a key pillar, the code week is another pillar. Even as we do our business, we are also recruiting Nigerian organizations to be our partners.

Hardy, who lives in North Carolina and repairs school band musical instruments by day, began selling his personalized messages in cartoon voices on Fiverr.com. The site allows users to buy and sell $5 products (such as an mp3 voice recording) and services (such as finding you 500 new Twitter followers). Some offerings are downright bizarre: "I will write messages on my lips and take photos for $5." Others, such as handmade drawings, seem far too labor-intense to sell for $5.

Hardy, though, has become one of the most successful Fiverr sellers, partly because he also takes advantage of the site's ability to "add on" products or services for more than $5. For an additional $50, he'll record not only his voice, but the sound of entire band, for example. He says he's earned more than $4,000 since opening his shop in September 2010. That cash has helped pay for his wife to go back to school. We asked Hardy to share some of his tips for other aspiring online earners.

Q: How much money have you made?
A: I just cleared the $4,000 mark and I started in September 2010. It seems like a constant stream of money is going into my PayPal account.



Q: Given the time you spend on it, how much do you think you're earning an hour?
A: Recently I've been getting seven or eight gigs a night, and it takes me between two and three hours, but some of those have add-ons, so it might be more than $5. With lyric writing, it takes me half an hour to bang out lyrics, and Fiverr takes $1 for every $5, so I earn about $8 an hour, and I can add music for more money. It's probably closer to $30 an hour—not enough to quit my day job yet.



Q: Do you have plans to expand?
A: If I could make a living off voiceovers, that would be cool. The way Fiverr goes, you don't need to run your own website. Because of the add-ons, you can earn more than $5.

Intrested In Earning #100,000+/monthly