The YouthMobile Project is an annual event, whose objective is to instill digital literacy and coding skills in the young generation- increasing the enthusiasm of young people for the basics of programming. The UNESCO YouthMobile Initiative leverages computer science education and the widespread availability of mobile phones to empower its students. Young girls and boys are introduced to coding as a resource to solve local issues and a tool to develop complex learning skills. Students are encouraged to develop, promote and eventually sell mobile applications as the key to ensuring sustainable development. The Youth mobile project for 2022 was implemented by Naza Agape Foundation and co-funded by UNESCO.
It was carried out in Jos Plateau State Nigeria in three schools. The project aimed to teach 500 girls basic App development using the AppGyver and Figma platforms which are no-code-low-code platforms for app development. The project was started on the 26th of May 2022 and was concluded on the 2nd of June 2022. It was held in two sections the Train-the-Trainers workshop and the Train-The-Girls Workshop. For the Train-the-Trainers workshop 20 teachers and
programmers were taught the course they would teach the girls. For the Train-The-Girls Workshop 522 girls were impacted from three schools, Emmanuel International Collage Jos, St. Theresa Girls College Jos, and COCIN Secondary.
School Rankyen, Gyel Jos. Two days were spent per school, teaching Figma on the first day and AppGyver on the second. Figma is a platform to design mobile applications while AppGyver is a platform to give functions to the
design. The girls were able to build the first and second working pages of an electoral sensitization app called My Election App.
Our overall experience with the girls was that a good number of them have very little experience with computers and even a far lesser number know about programming or application development. This has impacted their interest in tech negatively but with their participation in the YouthMobile project, we succeeded in increasing their interest in tech. The
computer laboratories were fairly updated, but not utilized and maintained properly. Some computers had sluggish operating systems, most of them ridden with computer viruses rendering some computers inoperational. One of the schools does not have computers or a computer lab at all. This school had most of the girls with little or no experience with computers at all. One of the schools only allows their students to use the computers rarely either because they
had few computers, poor power supply or fuel supply and they have only very few IT compliant staff. These schools had some girls with little or no experience with computers. Such girls had to be trained separately because they felt uncomfortable learning with their peers and they required more attention. In one of the schools.
it was quite difficult to get the public school teachers to take part in this project because they had poor knowledge about computers, most teachers felt uncomfortable admitting this, but the facilitators ingeniously used special techniques to get these sets of teachers to participate in the training. We encouraged the school to create a computer lab giving the school comprehensive instructional material that can form part of the learning content. We are grateful to UNESCO for the possibility to implement this project in the low and rural areas of Plateau State to train female students and their teachers, creating the necessary spark for them to use mobile app development as a pivot to create
sustainable ventures.
To read more about how the project was carried out click on the link below.
2022 UNESCO-Naza Agape Foundation YouthMobile report
