By Narayana Salamanca | Project Leader
We are very happy with the progress in our School of Code and Programming now called ACADEMIA GEEK (Geek Academy). The call for applications has been very well received and there are many young people who are motivated to be part of the change. Currently, Medellin is the city with the highest rate of unemployment in Colombia, where young people represent 18.9% of the unemployed population. This project is one of the proposals we have made to contribute to the closure of this gap and the solution of this problem; especially motivate young women to approach programming as an opportunity to improve their life quality and work for their future, being part of the generation that sees technology as a life alternative.
Our goal now is to provide 60 scholarships to young people between the ages of 18 and 25 who are neither studying nor working and proof their interest in programming. We have 82 people interested in our offer and we are still motivated to increase our participants to bring the program to all the young people of the city. The courses are designed according to the needs of the IT sector with whom we will seek to articulate the participants, and we have been working close to this companies to provide work opportunities to our students. This are the courses:
We started looking for students in February and worked in applications until May 24th, now we are about to start the training sessions in June 10th.
We were able to count with partners of different entities that work for closing the unemployment gaps in the city, and who will accompany young people in the employability process to enter the labor market, as well as for the development of interviews and interaction in work teams. We worked in campaigns to deliver information of our offer in all the communes, libraries, telecentres and community spaces. We also deployed important social media efforts, made a couple of fun videos motivating young people to apply and visited some local news tv programs promoting the scolarships programm.
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