Together, You and This 19 Year old Girl Geek Could Promote Coding

Martha Chumo for Nairobi Developer School

Martha Chumo — also known as Njeri Chelimo on Twitter — a 19 year old girl geek from Kenya was inspired to start Nairobi Developer School after being denied a visa to attend Hacker school in New York albeit raising the required travel FUNDS from her first Indiegogo campaign.

The visa denial couldn’t make her budge in resolve, instead she got inspired to start Nairobi Developer School to help the less fortunate in Kenya acquire coding skills. She launched her second Indiegogo campaign asking for seed fund of $ 50,000. She says that Nairobi Developer School will particularly address the great gender imbalance in the technology by encouraging women to participate in the program, and offer financial support to those who need it. They will invite women and other minority groups in tech to apply and the program allows them to thrive.

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The budding star in her glowed when she acquired a computer last year and become very obsessed with coding. An exercept from FastCoexist puts it that; she became a moderator on Codecademy, pulled in almost 1000 followers from all over the world on Twitter, made the “Dean’s List” on tech learning community Treehouse, racked up 187 contributions on Github. She found a community IRL too–started practicing at the Nairobi iHub co-working/incubator space, landed a job as a developer with a local Ruby on Rails shop, and taught and mentored other aspiring coders.

I’m ineligible to go to New York for Hacker School, but I am not ineligible to learn and become a better programmer! So I am starting a Dev School in Nairobi to give myself and numerous young East Africans a chance to learn, improve their programming skills, and build awesome technology for Africa. I am really excited about this because I still get to ‘become a better programmer’ this summer while teaching and helping others also. — Martha Chumo

It’s just a couple of hours to the end of the campaign, close to a quarter of the money raised so. The onus is unto us to contribute towards a movement that is going to empower many with coding skills. Let’s do this.

Contribute to the campaign of Indiegogo here.

Image via AkiraChix

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