Covenant House Newsroom

“I had the highest grade in my programming class at school — 93%!” reported one of the 50 girls, ages 12-18, who are participating in the “Girls and Teens Trained in Programming” workshop at Casa Alianza Honduras (CAH), as Covenant House is known in the Central American country.  

Begun three months ago, the workshop provides the girls with the basic concepts and fundamental skills they need to create digital applications and games for a variety of platforms, including desktop computers and mobile devices, as well as a basic understanding of digital design and robotics.

The workshop is led by CAH partner Women Do Tech, a Honduran organization devoted to closing the gender gap in science and technology by training girls and women for these fields. It is funded by a grant from the Office of Global Women’s Issues of the U.S. Department of State and part of the office’s Global Women, Peace and Security Initiative.

In addition to the program’s technology emphasis, it also aims to spark in the girls, who are overcoming homelessness and abuse, an entrepreneurial mindset and to prepare them to bring greater skills, expertise, and understanding to their participation as adults in Honduran society.

The workshop, which will be held over four trimesters, takes place at the CAH facility in Tegucigalpa, and, eventually, may be extended to CAH’s San Pedro Sula site. San Pedro Sula is one of the harshest cities in the country for at-risk children and teens.

One of the girls participating in the program calls the Saturday workshops “lovely,” because the teaching method is so different from those used at public and private schools and institutes, where teachers run through lessons much more quickly, though perhaps with far less interest.

“The workshop is really nice because the instructors are so patient, and sometimes we laugh a lot. They teach us to program carefully, step by step, in a really comfortable setting,” another girl says.

“You can be sure they’re not going to scold you if you make a mistake,” adds another. 

Their enthusiasm is not just for the comfortable learning environment, they say, but because in just three months they have learned so much that is new, despite, one participant says, having studied information technology before.

What’s most important about the training, one girl explains, “is that I have learned to command the computer, so it obeys me and does what I want it to do, and that’s thanks to the programming knowledge I’ve gained in such a short time.”

One of the girls interviewed shares that over the past three months, she has learned to draw with the mouse, combine colors, make promotional stickers, and restore old photos so they look like new. 

For the students, these kinds of workshops are a great opportunity. If it wasn’t for CAH and its supporters and partners, they would have no way of acquiring these in-demand skills.

The girls are clear about the value of learning to work with information technology. They know it will help them, when they are ready, to enter the work force with a better position. “A university degree isn’t enough these days. You need to have other skills; it’s what businesses demand,” one of them comments.

The workshops also allow the girls at CAH to interact with each other as well as meet other people, such as the course instructors. These interactions help the girls to be better human beings and to know that others have experienced some of the same, or worse, difficulties that they have experienced, and that, thanks to their own efforts, they are overcoming them.