More than app development: how coding is helping girls in Brazil build a future for themselves

Giovana Soares De Amorim didn’t know what she wanted to do after she graduated from high school in her hometown of Francisco Sá, lying 600km east of the capital city, Brasilia.

Then she attended a coding course and her direction became clear.

Bucking the global gender gap – but parity is yet to be achieved

Brazil stands out as an outlier of global gender gap trends.

In 2020, 85 per cent of women in Brazil were using the Internet compared to 77 per cent of men. This bucks the global average of 57 percent of women compared to 62 per cent of men globally.

Despite this, women represented roughly 13 per cent of Brazil’s graduates in Computer Science and related degrees in 2019. And in 2020, only 9.8 per cent of Brazil’s tech startup and venture capital ecosystem were founded by women, including 5.1 per cent of companies which were co-founded with men. [This is compared to female entrepreneurship at 34 per cent of Brazil’s businesses.]

Opening the possibilities

For Giovana, technology was never a priority growing up: “I’ve always had social media, but I’ve never been very active; I always preferred to play,” she said.

That is until her teacher introduced her to the Americas Girls Can Code (AGCC) Initiative.

What is the AGCC initiative?

Launched by ITU in 2019 and inspired by the African Girls Can Code Initiative, the AGCC is a unique platform that connects and engages girls across the Americas in the development of digital skills by promoting coding, robotics and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) activities.

The initiative contributes to global initiatives such as International Girls in ICT Day and EQUALS, by helping to bridge the gender digital divide and inspire girls and young women to pursue a career in ICT.

Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the AGCC grew in 2020, by expanding the initiative online. Two livestream events were held in Spanish and Portuguese to reach as many girls and young women throughout Latin America as possible, and to encourage and inspire them to consider a future career in the ICT field.

More than 7,000 participants from 23 countries took part in online workshops on a diversity of topics, including as digital careers, leadership, programming logic and bot development.

A new direction

Although her friends thought that it would be difficult to learn programming, Giovana believed that the AGCC programme could add to her professional growth and enable her to acquire some knowledge.

But she didn’t like the look of any of the courses – until she came across one on animation.

“I liked drawing, therefore what interested me most was creating the avatars. But I also learned a bit of programming and a bit of logic [a programme for animation]. By having something that I was always interested in together, I didn’t have a hard time dealing with math and programming,” she said. (See an example of her animated designs here!)

After that, her whole life changed direction.

Since completing the AGCC programme, Giovana is now majoring in Information Systems at college.

Her habits have changed, too: “Before college, I was interested in history, philosophy and sociology. Now, I am passionate about things related to technology,” she says.

What’s next?

The same impact was felt across the classroom. Speaking about how the AGCC programme has unlocked her student’s future, Giovana’s teacher, Danielly S. Ferreira, was quoted in a blog post, saying: “I could see the commitment of each [girl] in participating, the happiness of having completed the courses, and how significant this was in their lives – that they may reap the benefits in their careers.”

So, what does the future hold for Giovana? More coding, of course!

And her friends have even taken an interest in her activities, too: “Most [of my friends] ask me to create game apps.”

But perhaps they can learn to create the apps themselves at the next edition of the AGCC programme – “I would invite classmates to participate!” she says.

The 2022 edition of the AGCC programme was launched on 29 April during a Girls in ICT Day 2022 celebration organized by ITU Americas in partnership with META. Watch the event!