The tech scene is booming in Tanzania: a women’s project aims to get schoolgirls excited about programming and give them prospects for the future
The girls enter the tiled room with hesitant steps, a laptop under their arm. Their eyes leap over the wooden tables before they choose one of the plastic chairs. Honey Mwamba also pauses for a moment, then decides to sit with her back to the white board. She unfolds the laptop, carefully presses the start button, waits. More girls are arriving, between 13 and 15 years old, by the time a dozen laptops are opened.
Honey Mwamba is here for the first time today. Because her mother told her not to do so, she lied and said she was going to a seminar at school. Then she drove here with the collective bus from west Dar es Salaam for over half an hour. The fifteen-year-old has set herself a goal for this day: to build her first website.
Shortly afterwards, a young woman takes a seat at a table at the far end of the room, sits bolt upright on the chair, looks over the room, then delves into her smartphone. Only now and then does Modesta Joseph look up, nod to a latecomer with a laptop, or use pointed fingers to adjust the fabric mask that she has matched the color of her shoulder-free top. Then her fingers dash across the on-screen keyboard again.
A few years ago, Modesta Joseph sat shyly in front of a laptop. Then she built a website that changed her life. Today she will help Honey Mwamba get a few lines of programming closer to her dream. Modesta Joseph is a trainer at the NGO Apps and Girls.
The NGO would like to get school girls excited about computers, the internet and apps and give them a basic understanding of programming languages such as HTML. In addition to the weekly Coding Club, in which the girls are equipped with laptops in the training room in Mwananyamala, the team of eight trainers drives to schools across the country, gives workshops on digital education, promotes a robot competition and trains teachers so that they in turn can impart a basic understanding of laptops and smartphones.
Apps and Girls is working in an area that is developing rapidly in Tanzania: The use of mobile Internet has more than quadrupled in the last ten years, last year over 27 million mobile Internet accesses were registered for the first time – with almost 60 million residents . In Dar es Salaam, a “technology ecosystem” has developed in a district around Bagamoyo Road: The mobile communications provider Tigo has its headquarters here in a glass tower, as does Vodacom and Costech. Tech giants who want to digitize Tanzania with cheap data tariffs, mobile payment systems and broad 4G network coverage.
In the past few years, dozens of so-called tech hubs have settled in its orbit: open-plan offices in which dozens of young founders can rent individual tables cheaply and exchange ideas with one another. They have to overcome the same difficulties: attract investors and thus grow their business. “Sheria Kiganjani” is one such example, a smartphone platform that gives people access to legal texts, court judgments and legal representation. Or “Nala”, a mobile payment service provider.
The tech scene is booming in Tanzania and many other countries in Africa. They have one idea in common: anyone who knows programming languages knows a universal alphabet and thus the language of business in the 21st century. The district around Bagamoyo Road in Dar es Salaam is therefore known as “Silicon Dar”.
Apps and Girls cannot afford the rents in the glass towers. For this it is financed from one of these: the mobile operator Tigo provides the majority of the budget. The NGO’s office and training room are located in a white house two kilometers from Bagamoyo Road. This is where the girls come from the slums who have never held a laptop in their hands. And here Modesta Joseph and her fellow campaigners are trying to straighten out the list that could be intensified by the surge in digitization: discrimination against women. As everywhere in the world, in Tanzania, too, men in particular study natural sciences, engineering and computer science. Only ten percent of the students in computer science are female. If women are left out when start-ups set up or tech corporations settle in, they cannot participate in the economic upswing.
On this day, Honey Mwamba and Modesta Joseph meet, it’s not just about learning to build your own website. It is also about changing the future of Tanzania.
But first you need the basics: Modesta Joseph stands in the classroom between the tables while another trainer gradually writes commands on a white board.
“Please write and then close again,” she says, pointing to the lines. Modesta Joseph leans over the girls’ shoulders and tries to help: open HTML, open header, insert title, close header, close HTML. This is how the code is structured. Honey Mwamba’s fingers circling uncertainly over the keyboard. “This is my first time working with a laptop today,” she says, searching for the letter L. The laptop will be used by Apps and Girls for the duration of the workshop, there are no computers at Honey Mwamba’s school, only her father works at home on with a laptop, her mother never. She therefore does not understand her daughter’s passion. “She wants me to concentrate fully on school,” says Honey Mwamba. “But I want to be a musician, edit videos and have my own homepage. To do this, I have to learn to use a computer. “
Honey Mwamba turns around, fixes a line on the board, hastily turns back and tries to type it in quickly from memory. “I’m just too slow,” she mumbles, turning around again. “Save now!” Calls the trainer from the front, Modesta Joseph repeats it quietly for those who are too absorbed in their code. Honey clicks with trembling fingers, then: error message.
But there is no time for further attempts. “What should we do with the code now?” Asks the trainer into the room. The girls look at her in silence. “We use it to realize our own ideas!”, Surprises the trainer, looking into somewhat perplexed faces. The possibilities of the digital world do not open up to them that quickly. All Apps and Girls workshops are therefore divided into two parts. First the fundamentals of the digital alphabet, then a unit on entrepreneurship, that is to say “start-up”.
Modesta Joseph now steps next to the board with the codes. Honey Mwamba turns with her back to her laptop and the blinking cursor on the screen and looks mesmerized ahead. For a moment it becomes so quiet in the room that the noise of the engine murmurs through the windows. Then she begins to tell how a bus stop changed her life.
Modesta Joseph grew up in Kiwalani, a neighborhood of exposed brick houses and dusty streets on the approach path to Dar es Salaam airport. Her father worked in a shop for electrical appliances, her mother had left school after the seventh grade, organized the household after Modesta Joseph was born, in which eleven people lived: brother, uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins. And two dogs. On some days there was only enough money for one meal. “But we have overcome that,” says Modesta Joseph. Her parents’ greatest wish: the daughter should go to university and have things better. “You see great life in films – cars, clothes, food – and you want to achieve that too,” says Modesta Joseph. She made an effort, got top marks, and was admitted to a girls’ school in downtown Dar es Salaam.
Thirteen-year-old Modesta Joseph now walked every morning through narrow streets and along the main street to the bulge on the main street, from where she had to take the bus to the city center. And every morning that moment turned into a struggle.
At first she was not taken. Because schoolchildren in Tanzania only pay half the fare, the bus drivers preferred to fill the last few centimeters in the bus with adults for the full price and just left Modesta Joseph there. She learned from it, persistently argued with the bus drivers or paid the adult price straight away. Then she was finally standing in the aisle of the bus and – still half girl and already half woman – part of a swaying crowd, jeans on jeans, skin on skin, the breath of a passenger on the neck. And suddenly I had a hand on my bottom. Or got an obscene offer whispered in my ear. “Even fathers or mothers of young girls just looked the other way,” says Modesta Joseph with contempt in her voice.
One day during that time everything changed – with a laptop and a question. Modesta Joseph had heard of a “Coding Club” at school that was supposed to take place in her neighborhood. Modesta Joseph went to the address, entered a residential building. It was the home of Carolyne Ekyarisiima, a computer scientist from Uganda who founded Apps and Girls in 2013 – one of the very first “tech hubs” in Tanzania.
These weeks from then are recorded on a video. Modesta Joseph is sitting in Ekyarisiima’s living room on a plastic chair and in front of a laptop, in the midst of two dozen girls and surrounded by power strips, screens and plates full of food. A big LAN party.
Back then, seven years ago, it was Ekyarisiima who looked over her shoulder and helped find letters and arrange the code snippets correctly. So Modesta Joseph learned to write the first lines of HTML and to understand the structure of an app.
At some point Ekyarisiima asked the girls two questions: “What problem do you notice in society? And what do you want to do about it? “
Modesta Joseph thought of the bus stop, the bus ride, the humiliations and those who feel they have been treated unfairly. So also to yourself. “It felt as if someone had given me a white piece of paper and a pen and said: Now think about what your passion is and what you can do with it for yourself and others.”
She built a website, Ekyarisiima and her husband helped her with it. There, schoolchildren could fill in a form if they had been wronged on the way to school: report violent bus drivers, upload photos of the buses, note ID numbers and describe what had happened. The complaints were automatically forwarded to the responsible office at the city administration and the police. In addition, Modesta Joseph set up boxes in six schools into which those without internet access could drop their complaint forms. She called the project “Our Cries” – our screams. In the first two years, more than 600 complaints were received in the boxes and on the website.
Modesta Joseph, spurred on by the response, planned to establish a partnership with the transport authority and thus put the project on a firm footing. But for two years she tried in vain to even get an appointment with those responsible. Nobody took the then fifteen-year-old seriously.
In the meantime, Modesta Joseph did not give up her interest in computer science. She continued to attend the Apps and Girls coding clubs. She also took part in a workshop to build and program a robot to compete in an international robotics competition in Washington, DC. During the workshops, a person in charge of a development office in Dar es Salaam became aware of the student and her project “Our Cries”. He invited her to present a design that she could make better known. Modesta Joseph convinced, was funded and organized two large events with over 700 schoolchildren, representatives of the city administration, bus operators and police officers. Together they discussed right and wrong in school buses.
Modesta Joseph had done it: She had given her topic attention, not only in the authorities, but also in society.
Since then, her life has picked up speed. She won several awards from the start-up and entrepreneur scene, was selected by the We Are Family Foundation as Global Teen Leader 2017, took part in a summer camp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then attended the African Leader Academy in Johannesburg for two years. At the beginning of this year, Modesta Joseph began her studies in international business at the African Leader University in Rwanda and also runs an online shop for clothes, bags and shoes on Instagram; She has the goods embarked from China.
The idea of “Our Cries” has now been transferred to her first NGO: OVAH, for “Our voices against harassment.” OVAH offers seminars and videos for schoolgirls that deal with sexual self-determination, consent and equality.
After graduating, Modesta Joseph would like to design projects for an international NGO in the field of women’s rights and education and take care of the financing. “If you don’t have any money, you have no effect,” says the 22-year-old, appearing older than she actually is. They are big dreams. “Without Apps and Girls, I wouldn’t have the confidence to do it.”
Modesta Joseph waits for the silence that fills the classroom after she has finished her short lecture. Honey Mwamba stares forward, then her gaze is lost on the tiled floor as if she was already thinking hard. Modesta Joseph brings her back with two questions – the same ones that Ekyarisiima asked her back then: “What is the biggest problem for you in your neighborhood? And how do you want to change that? ”Her voice sounds so powerful, as if her entire biography was based on these two questions. “Please think about it until next week. Then we go on. “
When most of the students have already left, Honey Mwamba is still sitting in front of her laptop. She types slowly on the keyboard, constantly looking for letters and characters. Soon half the screen was filled with commands. It’s been five hours since she left her part of town in the morning. Still, she doesn’t seem tired. “So, save it now,” she says, biting her lower lip. No error message this time. She clicks on the file on the desktop, the browser opens. Honey lets out a cry of joy and claps her hands: “Yeeaah!”
There is a heading on the screen: “COVID-19”. And underneath: “Keep your distance from each other!” Your first own website. And possibly the start of another life.
