Google announces third round for Africa Developer Scholarships

Google has announced the third round of its Africa Develop Scholarship aimed at creating skills and opportunities for the continent.

Disclosing this in a statement, the search giant said the initiative would further build on the company’s “5-year engagement to help bridge the developer skills and opportunities gap in Africa by providing 100,000 African developers with access to high-quality, world-class training on mobile technologies and Cloud platforms.”

The statement reads: “We are pleased to announce the third round of Google Africa Developer Scholarships, as part of our commitment to create skills and economic opportunities for Africa. This builds on our 5-year engagement to help bridge the developer skills and opportunities gap in Africa by providing 100,000 African developers with access to high-quality, world-class training on mobile technologies and Cloud platforms.

“Today, we are announcing an additional 30,000 training scholarship opportunities and a further 1,000 grants for the Google Associate Android Developer and Associate Cloud Engineer certifications. The training will be delivered by our partners, Pluralsight and Andela, through an intensive curriculum designed to prepare learners for entry-level and intermediate roles as software developers.

“Across Africa we continue to see developers who have successfully gone through the scholarship program grow their careers and also use their skills to benefit their communities. Boutheina Bouchahda, a middle-school teacher from Tunisia, went through the training program last year and is building an application for her students to teach them how to program. Boutheina credits the scholarship program for her skills and confidence growth. Ayeah Godlove Akoni from Cameroon completed the web development skills track and immediately got a job as a web developer. He is also one of the 1,000 developers across Africa who qualified for the developer certification grants. .

“Throughout this journey, we have seen the value of peer-to-peer learning as a catalyst for deeper learning thanks to the in-person meetups facilitated by our community leads in multiple cities across Africa. Developers accepted into the scholarship will gain access to our network of over 250 Google Developer Groups and Developer Student Clubs in 150 cities across Africa. This connection to communities focused on Google technologies will provide access to extra skills and help inspire the next generation of software developers in Africa.

“Please click here to apply for the scholarship.”