"Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope.

Hope breeds peace."

- Confucious

Confucious' quote is appropriate for today's blog post. TVL strives to provide technology powered education with the end goal of improving economic development in the rural villages of Sierra Leone. We hope the educational opportunities we bring to Sierra Leone will breed confidence and hope in the people to build up their own country with creative solutions and innovations so they do not have to always rely on outside support.

In late 2015 Toptal, a network of the best freelance software engineers and designers in the world, brought to our attention two things:

1. Women make up around just 16% of the engineering workforce in the technology industry. The gap is even larger when you look at Open Source, with women making up just 6% of users on GitHub.
2. They have a scholarship program geared towards encouraging women and girls all over the world to learn how to code.

After learning this we felt compelled to bring this opportunity to Sierra Leone. So we began to put the gears in motion for a "Learn to Code" class for girls ages 13 - 18 with the option to apply for the Toptal scholarship at the end of the course. We've partnered with a local Silicon Valley coding guru, Janet Major, to help create a 7 week long course curriculum for the girls of Bumpe and Golu. Janet has been working in the computer industry for more than 30 years. She writes books about how to use hardware and software. The "Girls Who Code" movement has inspired her to get involved and help teach the younger generations about computer science. After months of planning we are ready to launch our first class on April 11th.

Our 7 week course will be taught in conjunction by Janet and our local partner, a Sierra Leonean nonprofit, Global Education and Justice Network. The course will use the book Teach Your Kids To Code as the text book and will be highly interactive with fun games that teach them how to code using Python.

Stay connected with us on Facebook to learn about updates as our program roles out.