She Code Africa Mentoring Program — Cohort 2 Recap
Today 31st of August, 2020 marks the end of another cohort from our Mentorship Program here at She Code Africa!🎉
We opened up applications for cohort 2 of the program in May 2020, with over 300 Mentee applications and 70 Mentor applications submitted from across a wide demographic of applicants from Nigeria, India, Uganda, Kenya, Republic of Congo, South Africa and Ghana.
At She Code Africa, we are particularly passionate about the growth of women in technology across Africa and designed the 3-months mentorship program to serve as an intensive learning program where we pair experienced individuals (mentors) from a range of tech fields with individuals who are willing & looking to grow their technical and soft skills (mentees).
What Changed since inception?
In this cohort, we made some major improvements to the application process so as to help us streamline and serve those who were really in need and met our program criteria.
- Technical Assessment stage: One of the changes we made was by implementing this phase to better understand the technical skill levels and learning efforts of the applicant, including beginners, as the program is meant to help those who had started making active effort to grow in their field, not just anyone.
- Skill Categories: We acknowledge applicants for the program have varying skill levels and as such, to better serve the different levels, we split the program tracks into 2 categories i.e beginner and intermediate tracks, this helped us better improve the content and the mentoring process as we had mentees who categorized themselves on the same level get mentored according to their level of understanding .
After a rigorous screening and on-boarding process facilitated by our amazing internal screening team and external technical volunteers, we successfully onboarded 155 Mentees and 27 Mentors into the Cohort 2 of the program and mentoring activities fully kicking off in June 2020 under the following beginner and intermediate tracks ;
Beginner Tracks:
- JavaScript
- PHP
- UI/UX Design
- Python
- Java
Intermediate Tracks:
- Front-end — React
- Front-end — Vue
- Back-end — Node + Express
- Back-end — Laravel
- Data Science
- Mobile development — Android (Kotlin)
- UI/UX Design
Amongst these, several other guidelines we implemented were also carried out in the 1st cohort including the creation of dedicated Learning paths for mentees, engaging SCA’s persons-of-contact for each mentoring group, monthly evaluation of mentors and mentees etc. read up more about it here
We’re attributing the success of this cohort to;
- The mentors who took time out to share and impact knowledge
- The mentees who have shown resilience and dedication to continuous learning and growth in their chosen tech field
- Our sponsors who made it easier for our mentees to keep learning via internet data sponsorship, paid course allocation
- Our POCs who dedicated their time to ensuring a seamless mentoring process for all mentees and mentors
As requirements to graduate from the program, here are some (but not limited to) links to technical projects, technical articles/talks created by our mentees .
Projects;
- https://vegedepot.netlify.app/ by Omolola Omolambe
- https://github.com/debbsefe/Quick-Credit by Mamus Eferha
- https://www.figma.com/file/wQSM49bdfySnEHomjzQ2zn/Caremom-App-Design?node-id=63%3A309 by Natasha Atokolo
- https://github.com/MoFalodun/Admission-Prediction.git by Modupe Falodun
- https://hey-weather.netlify.app/ by Hafsah Emekoma
Technical articles:
- https://abucynthia.hashnode.dev/how-to-deploy-a-machine-learnng-model-on-a-flask-app-and-heroku-cke1eul1l00i4vls1ac6ohyok by Cynthia Abu
- https://vickie.hashnode.dev/making-web-pages-in-django-cke5p53mv00ez8gs12qxn9p9r by Victory Wekwa
- https://medium.com/shecodeafrica/doing-simple-animations-in-a-react-app-using-greensock-animation-platform-gsap-ca09e95b5a17 by Akintan Alarape
- https://medium.com/@graciahills17/a-ux-ui-case-study-designing-an-information-based-app-295efb82d469?sk=7ad982cd0a43a2c1e87ab4a906bf79b5 by Grace Akporiro
- https://medium.com/@lola.omolambe/image-upload-using-cloudinary-node-and-mongoose-2f6f0723c745 by Omolola Omolambe
- https://medium.com/@uzodinma.confidence/how-i-developed-my-creative-process-to-ui-ux-design-projects-via-shecodeafrica-courses-34afef31b689 by Confidence Uzodinma
and many more…
Next Steps:
To ensure they maintain steady growth after the program, We plan to continually follow up with our mentees in the coming months on their learning activities and progress in their respective fields.
Our Online community remains a platform where the mentees can continue to engage with each other, get access to more resources and opportunities needed to grow.
The mentees are also encouraged to give back knowledge gained, by actively participating in our ask-a-mentor channel within the community as junior mentors.
We’re also looking forward to partnering or working with willing companies or organisations interested in onboarding these ladies either as interns or full time employees in their respective fields.
(Do send us an email via partnerships@shecodeafrica.org if you would like to work with any of our successful mentees.)
COHORT 3 APPLICATIONS:
We’ve opened up applications for anyone who would like to take on the role of a mentor in our next cohort; Cohort 3. Interested applicants can apply here: bit.ly/SCA-mentor-C3
Activities for this cohort(3) will fully kick off in October and run through till December 2020.
Our mentorship program is fully open to support in form of Sponsorship / Donations, kindly click the link here to make a donation ❤️
…here’s to raising more women in tech, in Africa!
