Where cattle herders’ daughters learn computer coding

On a Monday morning in Ngwenyameni, a village 38 kilometers (24 miles) south of the capital of Mbabane, eight students at Techno Friends Eswatini wait eagerly at their desks.

Outside, cattle graze across the rolling hills and the voices of herdsmen are a distant soundtrack. The classroom building, a hut-shaped structure made out recycled materials and straw, blends seamlessly into the village idyll. But inside, the learners are far removed from their rural surroundings. 

Standing in front of a big screen displaying a live feed, teacher Bongekile Shiba addresses her students, some of whom nervously press the keyboards on their donated laptops. “Today, we’re going to learn about computer coding. Have any of you heard of it before?”

Almost all of them shake their heads. 

“Computer coding is a way of giving instructions to a computer, so it can perform specific tasks. It’s like giving a recipe to a chef, so they know how to make a dish,” Ms. Shiba explains, typing on the keyboard so lines of code appear on the projector screen.

A sense of aspiration

So begins a typical session as Ms. Shiba brings critical modern skills – and a sense of aspiration – to a community where poverty and cultural attitudes drive many girls out of education long before they reach college.

In Eswatini, a tiny landlocked country in southern Africa formerly known as Swaziland, around 80% of girls enroll in primary school. But that number plummets to just 1 in 2 when it comes to university. At the University of Eswatini, one of the country’s top tertiary education institutions, twice as many men are enrolled in sciences as women. 

In rural areas, the odds are stacked even further against girls. Because the country has the world’s highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, money that could go to a child’s schooling often has to go toward treating family members battling the illness. Girls are almost always the first to be pulled out of education in such cases. And around 1 in 6 women in Eswatini are married before they turn 18.  

That means for students like Tiyandza Msibi, enrolling into the tech school carries added significance.

“I have learnt how to use loops, functions, and soon I will be creating a phone app. I’ve managed to make educational projects about the world,” the sixth grader says proudly, adding that she sees herself becoming an entrepreneur when she grows up.

More inclusion

A high school history teacher and career counselor for over a decade, Ms. Shiba also taught herself coding using online lessons. When the pandemic swept through Eswatini in 2020, she saw a silver lining. In January of that year, she began giving free coding and programming lessons to a small group of students via Zoom. Word-of-mouth meant that within weeks, hundreds were logging on to her sessions.

Techno Friends was born, nurtured by a belief that the earlier girls start honing a skill, the better. Children as young as first grade now take part in the classes.

“Successful swimmers, athletes, soccer stars, and programmers started working on their crafts early in life,” says Ms. Shiba, who also holds a postgraduate certificate in education from neighboring South Africa’s prestigious Rhodes University. 

Spending time in Africa’s most developed economy spurred Ms. Shiba in other ways. She realized that her own country’s education system wasn’t adequately equipping children with digital skills for today’s world. 

And the pandemic, when schools in the country shuttered, brought home this view. She put out a poster advertising free coding classes on social media, and the rest was history. Today, Ms. Shiba and three other teachers continue to run Techno Friends’ online lessons. Children attend from all over Eswatini – as do two learners based in Canada. 

But it is in Ngwenyameni, where Ms. Shiba herself grew up, that several dozen girls gather for the after-school club held in the modest hut. There, Ms. Shiba introduces learners to and guides them through digital platforms so they learn to program, and create interactive stories, video games, animation, and digital art. Students also learn to build prototype machines and write code instructions. 

“By increasing the representation of girls in AI, we can create a more diverse and inclusive field that better reflects the needs and perspectives of the entire population. This can lead to more effective and equitable solutions that benefit everyone,” Ms. Shiba says.

Big ambitions

One recent afternoon, grade three pupil Aviwe Shabalala sat in a class and worked on creating an app. Her dream, she says, is to become a software engineer “so I can help people get rid of bugs in their apps.”

Statistics on gender disparity in science and technology in Eswatini barely exist – itself highlighting the problem, says Nicky Ndwandwe, an education and science officer at UNESCO. But the United Nations agency plans to publish an updated study that will address this gap, making it easier to know where to focus resources.

For now, Techno Friends is mostly self-funded, with students paying only a token fee toward running costs. But Ms. Shiba has big plans on the horizon – an attitude she hopes will also serve as a model for her own students.

Eventually, she says, her goal is to build a technology park with a robotics laboratory, the first in the country. And she’s partnered with the Forum for African Women Educationalists Eswatini, a nongovernmental organization that’s helping to arrange job shadowing and internships both within and outside the tech world – providing opportunities that are far from guaranteed in a country with an unemployment rate that hovers around 24%.

“It is essential that every child in Africa learns how to think, identify current problems, and write programs for machines to solve those problems in a way that is inclusive to everyone in their own communities,” Ms. Shiba says.