Meet the Woman Changing the Lives of South Africa's Township Children Through Coding

Giving Compass' Take:

• Lindiwe Matali is creating a coding academy across various townships of South Africa that will offer coding classes to students who are interested in pursuing STEM. 

• What kinds of opportunities would these classes provide for young people in South Africa?

• Read about successful arts programs in South Africa. 

Lindiwe Matlali is on a mission to change the lives of children in South African townships.

A graduate of Columbia University in New York and the founder of Apodytes, a tech company, Matlali created the coding academy Africa Teen Geeks in 2014 after meeting an 8-year-old coder who had built her own app in the US.

The meeting inspired her to research the state of computer science education in South Africa.

“I learned that information technology was only taught from grade 10 and only in affluent schools,” she tells Global Citizen.

By breaking barriers to access created by high data costs and the historic inequalities that have left South Africa’s township underdeveloped and under-resourced, Africa Teen Geeks is ensuring that no child is left behind in the tech revolution.

Her work is also inspired by research from the Equal Opportunity Project at Harvard University that focused on “lost Einsteins.” The research found that children from wealthy families are more likely to be innovators, and that if a child meets an innovator, they are likely to grow up and be innovative, too.

Classes are held at various locations in all nine provinces in the country, with participants who are aged between 8 and 18. “We have over 238 kids in our programmes and even more waiting to start,” she says.

What makes Africa Teen Geeks work even more important is that their weekend coding classes are held in various townships across South Africa.

The coding classes are already opening up a world of possibilities for participants. They competed at a Global Hackathon that was hosted in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Africa Teen Geeks, and Symantec in Mountain View, California, in the United States.