Knowledge Sharing Campaign (KSC)

Knowledge Sharing Campaign (KSC) empowers African students in the diaspora and reverses brain drain by providing them with access to modern technology, which becomes a culture that promotes the love for quality education. Every month, we bring together hundreds of African students for weekend workshops to teach them basic computer skills so they can improve their education and their job prospects when they go home. We then offer a few selected students a 4-week hands-on Agile software development internship. Students in this program do problem solving using the discipline of Agile software development and are expected to develop a simple application. This teaches them a discipline useful in many environments even if they don’t become programmers. We realise that the scattered young Africans around the globe form a powerful, huge community that can be united through a love for quality education using technology. We learn that the African student diaspora in India is as large as around 100,000 students. Young men and women who left their families are hungry for knowledge and passionate about quality education, which is key for today’s youth to plan for a better future. KSC pulls together African student communities in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune, and we discover that most of them do not even know how to efficiently use basic tech tools like Google applications, while they have Gmail accounts, because only about 10% of KSC participants had true exposure and access to a computer before. KSC provides students with the capacity, social capital and a common practice of how to solve problems and make decisions together. More than tech, more than expertise, KSC sees this as the rocket fuel needed, to give communities tech skills, to demand a safe and more inclusive environment of continuous learning and dignity for themselves and for Africa.