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Welcome to CodeBrave’s
2023 Impact Report
CodeBrave teaches marketable tech skills to children from disadvantaged areas in Lebanon at shelters and under-resourced schools. We link them to opportunities through our strategic partnerships and collaborations with Beirut Digital District, American University of Beirut, LebNet, McKinsey, and many others.
In 2023, we reached 1,006 students with CodeBrave’s programmes. One of them was Jana. Read her story below.
“My dad made it to 9th grade. My mum stopped her studies after marriage. I wanted a brighter future.”
Jana is a 18-year-old girl from South Lebanon. When we met her, she was in 12th Grade, attending the local public school which only opened for a couple of months that year. Jana is exceptionally bright and was desperate to go to university, a chance her parents didn’t get. She discovered coding during our web development programme and it became her passion. After a year with CodeBrave, Jana got a full scholarship to AUB and is now studying Computer Engineering. Today, Jana is gaining experience building a website for a professional client, a career coach based in the US, as part of her CodeBrave internship. Check out this video of Jana >
Our Impact In 2023
Where we implement our programme:
– Makassed School in Tariq Al Jdideh
– Tahaddi Non-Formal Education Centre in Hay Al Gharbeh
– Dar Al Awlad in Beit Meri
– Maarouf Saad Public School in Saida
– Makassed School in Al Marj
– Jusoor school in the Bekaa
– 3 LFPA partner schools in Sour
– And online – CodeBrave WebDev Programme students join classes remotely from all over Lebanon
“Lebanon has so many talented girls that are still scared of tech. I want to change that!”
Meet Rawan, a 16-year-old from a public school in Mount Lebanon. When we first met her, she didn’t feel like she belonged in the tech field because she was a girl. In 2022, Rawan participated in a coding workshop with CodeBrave and learnt that girls can absolutely succeed in tech. She then joined our Web Development programme, where she learned Python and web development. Rawan’s work experience module involved building a website for CSRN, a professional client in the UK. “Now, I am aware of the challenges of girls in tech but I will embrace them. The tech field doesn’t terrify me anymore.” Rawan has grown confident and become a role model for other girls in tech. She set up a web development class for 40 students at her school, mainly girls. Last summer, she travelled to the US with TechGirls, a tech exchange programme for girls. Rawan has recently received a full scholarship to study Computer Science in the US!
Featured Student Projects
Read with Jana
Jana, at 17 years old, built this website to share her love for reading with the world. ‘Read with Jana’ is an online library that provides readers with handpicked books by Jana herself. Besides the content, Jana also shows off her love for design with the wonderful UI/UX.
Guess The Word:
Makram, a Web Dev Programme from Cohort 3 who is still at the very early stages of the scholarship programme, coded this Guess the Word game using his new Python skills. It lets the player choose how hard or easy the level is. Try it out!
Partners & Collaborators
Funding Partners
Thought Leadership & Advocacy
Thought Leadership
“Every year, technology undergoes rapid advancements. At CodeBrave, we understand the importance of staying current, which is why we continually review and update our curriculum. In the summer of 2023, our attention turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI), a topic that surged into public consciousness with the advent of transformative tools like ChatGPT. Our curriculum revamp included lesson plans designed to immerse students in machine learning models and demystify key AI concepts. With new code generation tools like ChatGPT and AlphaCode, professional coding is profoundly changing. As our students engage in traditional project-building exercises, we encourage them to contemplate how AI is reshaping real-world project implementation.
Nowadays, questions often arise about the relevance of learning to code in light of new AI-driven code-generation tools. To address these concerns, we conducted thorough research into the impact of AI on coding education. We shared our insights in an article published on Thomson Reuters’ Context News. This article emphasises the importance of coding education in nurturing vital cognitive skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity. These skills will remain invaluable as technology continues to evolve. Our commitment to thought leadership led our team to participate in two AI and tech education panels in Brussels and Beirut to share these findings and discuss the future of AI-powered tech education.
Eliana Sleiman, Co-Director and Head of Education
Challenges
Challenges
1. Continuing economic crisis: The continuing economic crisis has pushed many teachers to look for after school work to help make ends meet. This means that they have less time and energy to invest in a professional development programme. We have offered school teachers who attend our training the opportunity to access competitively paid work opportunities with CodeBrave during the school holidays.
2. Conflict in the Southern Border: The conflict in the South has left around 50 schools closed and 46,000 people displaced. CodeBrave’s projects have not been affected so far and we have been able to continue as planned. Our aim is to maintain a sense of normalcy for our students wherever possible.
Tech Education Is More Important Than Ever
Lebanon’s economic collapse and political instability grow with the conflict at its Southern border and amidst the deteriorating state of the whole region. This results in a drastic impact on education and employment opportunities for young people. Parents are removing children from schools to afford covering their basic human needs. Youth are increasingly unemployed (48% of Lebanon’s youth today) despite the fact that local companies are actively looking to hire, but are not finding the right talent.
Building children’s tech, problem-solving and creative thinking skills from a young age is a uniquely powerful solution for their future. These skills will help young people secure safe, decent and future-proof work, access international remote job opportunities, and give them greater independence from the situation befalling the country.
Financial Sustainability Through CodeBrave Tutors
Our work in 2023 continued to be partly funded through our social enterprise CodeBrave Tutors which we set up to provide more sustainable income for CodeBrave Lebanon.
We’re happy to say that we’re growing! Through CodeBrave Tutors, our private coding tutoring service, we have taught 274 children worldwide online coding, robotics and AI classes, with all profits going to CodeBrave Lebanon through our one for one model.
We also received support from Al-Fanar to grow our client base and thereby increase our financial sustainability.
CodeBrave Tutors was also featured on WIRED and Deloitte’s Technology Fast50 companies in MENA.
- 274 clients to date funding classes for disadvantaged children in Lebanon through our “one-for-one” model
- 18 jobs for tutors in Lebanon created in 2023 (with youth unemployment now over 48% in Lebanon, job creation is also an important social impact)
Looking Ahead
Having scaled from a grassroot project for 20 children at an orphanage in Kahaleh to now reaching over 1,000 in 2023, we are looking to the next stage of impact by focusing our efforts on upskilling schools. In 2024, we plan to upskill 9 schools and their educators to deliver quality Coding, Robotics & AI education using CodeBrave’s accredited curriculum, and provide STEM equipment.
Our goal over the next three-years is to teach 20,000 marginalised Lebanese youth to code, equipping them with the tech and cognitive skills to lift themselves out of poverty, and transforming the STEM capacity of schools through our School Upskilling initiative.
We believe that the most effective way to deliver on this mission is to tackle it from both a social enterprise and charitable angle. We aim to become increasingly financially sustainable by combining traditional fundraising (50%) and self-generated revenue (50%) via CodeBrave Tutors (target split by end-2027).
Donate
You can contribute to CodeBrave’s work by donating to CodeBrave Foundation, a registered charity in England and Wales, no. 1188692.
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