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A technology education initiative founded by a Nigerian teenager, SPARK Tech Africa, has opened applications for its second annual coding programme for girls aged 11 to 16 across Africa.
The five-month programme, which is completely free, is designed to introduce young girls to Python programming, technology and STEM while providing mentorship and an opportunity to develop independent technology projects.
Applications for the 2027 cohort opened on September 1, 2026, and will close on October 17, 2026.
The programme was founded by Camille Ananyi, a Nigerian student currently attending Menlo School in Silicon Valley, California, following her own experiences with technology education and mentorship.
Speaking on the initiative, Ananyi said the first cohort demonstrated that girls without previous programming experience could learn coding and develop their own projects when given structured support.
“For our first year, the most important thing was proving that we could take girls who were curious about technology, including girls with no previous programming experience, and give them a structured path to actually build something of their own,” she said.
“Now we want to build on what we learned from that first cohort and give even more girls the confidence to see themselves not just as users of technology, but as people who can create it.”
The 2027 programme will run for five months, beginning with online, self-paced lessons in January.
From January to March, participants will learn the fundamentals of Python programming. Between April and mid-May, they will work on individual projects, applying the skills they have acquired with guidance from mentors.
The programme will end in mid-May with participants presenting their projects and explaining the problems they sought to solve.
According to the organisers, applicants do not need previous programming experience. However, participants are expected to have basic computer skills, access to a laptop and reliable internet, and be able to commit about two to three hours each week to the programme.
The initiative is particularly targeted at girls who are curious about STEM, motivated to learn and prepared to work consistently throughout the programme.
Ananyi said the programme was created to address the gap in access to technology opportunities for young African girls.
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“Talent is everywhere, but access to opportunity isn’t,” she said.
“A girl shouldn’t have to already know how to code, attend a particular school or live near a technology hub before she gets the chance to discover that she may be great at it. SPARK is designed to make that first opportunity much easier to access.”
Ananyi founded SPARK Tech Africa in 2025 after experiencing the impact of technology education and mentorship on her own development.
She began learning technology with Scratch at Co-Creation Hub’s Summer of Code in Lagos before participating in technology programmes through iD Tech at Stanford University and the Data Science and Machine Learning programme with Summer Springboard at the University of California, Berkeley.
She is also an alumna of MAGIC (More Active Girls In Computing), a Silicon Valley mentorship programme for girls interested in computing.
More recently, she participated in the Abridge-Anthropic Hackathon, where she built an agent using Claude Code.
Her experiences inspired the creation of SPARK Tech Africa, with the initiative seeking to combine technical education, mentorship and exposure to opportunities within the global technology ecosystem.
SPARK stands for Support Passionate Africans through Relationships, Knowledge, and Tech.
While the broader vision of the initiative is to increase access to STEM opportunities for young African girls, the organisers said the immediate focus of the second-year programme is practical — helping participants learn programming and complete the programme having built something of their own.
Applications for the 2027 cohort are currently open and will close on October 17.
Interested students can apply through the programme’s website, while enquiries can be sent to the organisers via email.
The programme has limited spaces, and applicants are encouraged to submit their applications before the deadline.
