GirlCode 12 month Software Development Engineer Learnership 2021 for unemployed women.

Application Deadline: February 28th 2021 

GirlCode has partnered with AWS to train 30 unemployed women through a 12 month Software Development Engineer Learnership. It will be commencing on 1 April 2021 and running for 12 months on a full-time basis. You will work on practical projects, learn and practice with relevant tech and tools. Experience how agile teams need to operate in a business environment as well as soft skills to prepare them for the world of work.

What makes this program particularly unique is that GirlCode has partnered with tech startups in which you can get their work experience from.

Applications are open to unemployed South African women with a valid ID, age 18-35 and can attend the Learnership full time at our campus in Midrand.

Click here to apply: http://bit.ly/2NgCG3n

United States reengages with Africa’s Prosperity in Mind

With China as a dominant foreign power in Africa, the only option left for United States to engage with the continent is to follow its priorities: namely, prioritizing African youth.

Any policy engagement which does not think of Africa as a whole will have a limited impact. PEPFAR demonstrated the impact of a coordinated response to fight AIDS in Africa. The new administration can learn from the health response to leverage the Africa First strategy embedded in the AfCFTA. Working through AfCFTA starts with agriculture to enable, with us, prosperity in rural communities first. As that happens, achieving prosperity for the whole of society requires youth to work, create work, and step onto the bandwagon of prosperity. In addition, it is our responsibility to seek unity in African relationships with foreign countries where the temptation to accept fifty-four different agreements is real. Though it appears easier to do it alone, universal issues like youth migration demonstrate that we need to do it together, as only unity will make the 1.3 billion-person market work for Africa and its partners.  

Africa’s youth have a clearer sense of what they aspire to for themselves and the continent. As such, urban and rural youths have their role to play in becoming actors of the development of the continent based on their own accurate understanding of continental policies. Many understand that it is better to enable prosperity, and this is what the Chinese dream invokes. The American dream will remain, but will no longer be the preferred narrative on the African continent.

It is clear that U.S. reengagement with Africa has to be seen and implemented through the lens of the continent’s youth. The YALI initiative gave young Africans a framework to engage, but its real value would have been to invest in learning institutions on the continent so that young Africans could deepen their own understanding of who they are in relation to their peers.

The policies of the past forty years intended to move the cursor of development toward full capacity. Yet, political upheavals on the continent and the changing U.S. political landscape have not been consistent in delivering on what matters to young people: decent jobs. By navigating the sociopolitical challenges of the continent, we may not have been able to take full advantage of the economic offers that were made available. 

In reality, it is political. In essence, it is financial. Yet, in the end, it should be human. A human-centered reengagement means that we must start with what we already have in Africa: an abundant youth with aspirations for the world embedded in the informal economy that we have today. We can: and the world’s future depends on our ability to put Africa first. 

Innovation: May Tomorrow Find Us Farther Than Today

The African continent bursts with its youth’s creativity, from the informal sector to the tech savvy: all entrepreneurs in their fields. Any local, regional, or global policies that miss their needs and aspirations are bound to fail. In this respect, there are four areas that matter to Africans for the United States of America to reengage Africa. 

Agriculture
Agricultural transformation in the United States of America limited the impact of chronic malnutrition and hunger and enabled economic progress in the country. Agriculture is especially useful in its potential to provide jobs for workers with low-level skills who spend most of their income on food. We know that planned agricultural transformation in Brazil, China, and Vietnam created jobs, raised incomes, and fostered the conditions for the workforce to move gradually into higher-value economic activities. China succeeded in its agricultural transformation and thus opened the pathway for added value-chain opportunities twenty years down the line. 

The first priority for African agriculture will be to meet modern tools and techniques. That is not a problem for the United States of America to resolve; rather, African citizens should value the contribution of rural Africa to their urban transformation. We know that the most effective way to transform a country or a continent is by supporting agriculture. And in our context, like in other parts of the world, we need to redesign the economy so that modern farming techniques do not just adapt to climate change, but ignite the flame of sustainable transformation. 

We know that growth from commodity extraction and trading, for instance, does not redistribute wealth nor enable prosperity for the majority. The value addition that it might be able to create is exported and exacerbates rent-seeking behavior from urban elites. So the relationship between the United States of America and Africa will benefit from higher value engagement when Africans transform their agriculture without limiting their scope to the AGOA. For example, agriculture in Africa must start to reflect the needs of its population to avert the impact of lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes, on its urban and rural populations. Yet, Africa’s food import bill is predicted to rise to $110 billion annually by 2025, from $35.4 billion in 2015; this means that African farmers, especially women, are not moving up the value chain. 

Manufacturing
One way to accelerate this process is to move up the value chain and create a greater interest for young people to enter with their creativity. In Tunisia, agriculture represents about 11 percent of GDP and 15 percent of employment. The country counts ninety-two thousand engineers, with about ten thousand of these unemployed. Through modernization and addressing climate change, incentives can be created for youth along the value chain of agriculture, which will inevitably progress into light manufacturing. That transformation will capture the spending of those that need to eat at low cost. In Nigeria, for example, making noodles ensures that local skills and local context meet the demands of those who make some parts of the economy grow: informal workers. 

A coordinated effort by African citizens to demand better conditions for their fellow citizens by consuming and purchasing local output is also essential. We cannot continue to wish for better local content when we continue to import most of our items from outside the African continent. This is also a local prerogative; certainly, the United States of America is not, necessarily, responsible for our individual consumption choices when we are 1.3 billion people. 

Market-creating innovations transform complicated and expensive products into products that are simple and affordable, making them accessible to many more people who historically couldn’t afford them. Innovation requires us to look at our resources under AfCFTA and invest in what is required to produce, with greener energy, what the fifty-four African countries need. Leverage will come from the infrastructure required to move people, goods, and services through the continent, from Lesotho to Cape Verde. 

Industrialization
The Coronavirus pandemic demonstrated that Africa cannot rely on global supply chains to absorb its raw materials. Industrialization is a process: it requires a number of ingredients, most importantly energy. In the absence of energy, the other elements find it hard to connect and add value. In this context, the Power Africa initiative by the United States Agency for International Development is helping to turn more lights on and transform lives by providing first-time access to electricity for 14.8 million new home and business connections. And, because Africa is a latecomer, our industrialization should be green. In this respect, renewable energy presents a real opportunity for Africa to create jobs in energy generation and in the supply chain required to move products across the continent. Just like the engagement seen in AIDS and Ebola, energy must have a purpose: and that purpose is industrialization.

Trade
Trade is about people making informed decisions about their comparative advantage. That is a critical, yet understated, element of the future of the United States of America–Africa relationship. The model of development that some African leaders are implementing reflects, in part, their own engagement with the West when they were students or workers. But, with China’s growing influences in the continent, Africa’s present and future will have an eastern flavor.

The AGOA did not take the continent to a point where trade transformed lives at scale. In fact, recent data demonstrates that China is the main African trading partner. This means that young people may increasingly engage with China for work, and that the African informal sector, through trade of imported goods and services, is looking East. Opportunities to learn will determine the nature of the Africa–China relationship for the next generation of leaders; unlike my generation, the number of African students in China increased twenty-fold since 2005. One of the key implications of this is that future African decision-makers will have the benefit of having experienced the impact of large-scale growth, agricultural transformation, manufacturing and industrialization: an invaluable experience, also changing the nature of young Africans’ relationship to the United States of America.  

Part of the draw of China stems from a realization among Africans that alternatives exist to the United States of America. Young Africans see that China escaped the poverty trap through homegrown solutions that focused on value addition and global value chains while emphasizing domestic transformation. They have seen how “Made in China” transforms the lives of millions of people, from agriculture to industrialization. Having observed that transformation, it is unlikely that young Africans will look west of the Sahara only.

Nigeria’s Central Bank Closes Crypto Accounts Citing Threats To Financial Stability

In a letter Friday (Feb. 5), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) ordered financial institutions (FIs) and deposit money banks (DMBs) to close crypto-related accounts immediately.

The CBN reminded these institutions that “dealing in cryptocurrencies or facilitating payments for cryptocurrency exchanges is prohibited,” and any breaches of the order would result in “severe” sanctions.

The central bank further explained the directive in an additional statement on Sunday (Feb. 7) in a response to various comments and reactions, noting the bank is not instating any new restrictions and reiterating that cryptocurrencies have been prohibited since 2017.

The statement, signed by the bank’s Ag. Director of Corporate Communications Osita Nwanisobi, highlighted several issues the bank has with cryptocurrencies, including their unregulated and unlicensed status and their popularity with criminals seeking to launder money, evade taxes, deal in illegal trades and fund terrorism.

“… the very name and nature of ‘cryptocurrencies’ suggests that its patrons and users value anonymity, obscurity and concealment,” the statement read. “The question that one may need to ask therefore is why any entity would disguise its transactions if they were legal.”

The bank also noted cryptocurrencies’ “significant volatility” as a concern, pointing to bitcoin’s recent ups and downs. The CBN also noted that their lack of “market fundamentals,” and the ever-present possibility of the introduction of a new cryptocurrency based on a new mathematical model “may someday crash the price to zero.”

Furthermore, Nwanisobi noted in the statement that Nigeria is “not an outlier” in this view, listing 16 other countries, including China, Saudi Arabia, and Canada, that have restrictions in place on cryptocurrency transactions.

“Even famed investor Warren Buffett has called cryptocurrencies ‘rat poison squared,’ a ‘mirage,’ and a ‘gambling device,’” according to the statement.

In the statement, the CBN also sought to clarify that while it “has no comfort in cryptocurrencies,” this does not reflect its feelings toward FinTech innovation nor a digital payment system. Instead, the bank stated that it has created an “enabling investment environment in the payments system.”

COVID-19: ANGOLA REGISTERS 76 RECOVERIES AND 33 NEW INFECTIONS

The Angolan health authorities announced, last Friday, the recovery of 76 patients, 33 new infections and 3 deaths in the last 24 hours.

Among the new patients, whose ages range from 1 to 77 years, 16 were diagnosed in Luanda (Capital), 6 in Cabinda, 6 in Huambo, 3 in Bié and 1 in Zaire, being 11 male and 22 female.

 

Among the recovered, 24 are in Huambo, 22 in Huila, 17 in Luanda, 8 in Uíge, 4 in Bié and 1 in Lunda Sul.

 

According to the secretary of State for Public Heath, Franco Mufinda, who was speaking at the usual data update session, the referred period three deaths were registered involving Angolan citizens, one from Luanda and two from Huambo.

 

The laboratories processed 2,290 samples on the basis of molecular biology (RT-PCR), with a daily positivity rate of 1.4%.

 

Angola has 20.294 positive cases, with 490 deaths, 18 786 recovered and 1 018 active cases. Of the patients, 8 are in critical condition, 8 severe, 75 moderate, 73 with mild symptoms and 854 asymptomatic.

 

In the Public health centers, 164 people are in institutional quarantine, 129 are hospitalized and 1,868 are under epidemiological surveillance.

Valentine’s Day eve: Kingsbite chocolate out of stock

 As Ghana prepares to join the rest of the world to celebrate Valentine’s Day, gifts like chocolate, especially Golden Tree Kingsbite Chocolate, has run out of stock in a number of shops in Accra.

The day is referred to as “Chocolate Day” in Ghana through government’s initiative to ensure that chocolate and other cocoa products are consumed as they bring many health benefits to the consumer.

Hence chocolate is often among the items people purchased for their loved ones on Val’s Day.

Mostly marked with the colour ‘Red’, the day inspires people to present hampers often containing red rose flowers, red and white mugs, teddy bears, champagnes, cookies, chocolates, red underwear, and dresses, among other things.

The Ghana News Agency, on its market survey on Saturday, the eve of Valentine’s Day, observed that traders were cashing in on the season by selling chocolates and other cocoa products.

A visit to the Central Business District of Accra, the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Lapaz, Dome and the Kaneshie markets revealed that the big size of Kingsbite chocolate was selling at GH¢7.00, while the medium was selling at GH¢5.00, but most of the traders complained of product shortage.

The traders said they could barely get the small sizes to sell and the big and medium sizes were also not in good supply as compared to some few years ago when chocolates were in abundance and in stock at many shops.

“Those days you could see chocolates being sold on table-tops or by street hawkers before or during Valentine’s days, however, this year’s situation is different as a number of shops and vendors can hardly get the chocolates to sell,” Madam Yaaya Afriyie, a retailer at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, said.

She said she purchased few Golden Tree Chocolates from wholesale shops in Accra because of the shortage in supply.

“Anytime we went to COCOBOD, we were informed they were finished so most retailers usually bought the few they could get from the wholesale shops here,” she said.

Madam Afriyie said they had to deal in flowers, mugs, perfumes, teddy bears and other foreign chocolates to complement the few chocolates they had for sale.

She said she and her friends traded in other chocolates like ‘Amor,’ which costed GH¢8.00 and Magic Chocolates, sold at GH¢5.00 for two pieces.

Meanwhile, a box of Tetteh Quarshie Premium and Kingsbite Golden Tree chocolates sold at GHS60, she said.

Madam Afriyie urged government to ensure more local chocolates were produced to meet the demands of consumers, including Ghanaians and foreign nationals.

However, the story was quite different for Madam Cynthia Ankomah, the Chief Executive Officer of Adwene Sisa Company Limited in Accra, as she had not been affected by the shortage.

She said she purchased Golden Tree chocolates directly from the Cocoa Processing Company (CPC), Tema, and in large quantities but added that sales were not as good as last year.

“Last year, sales were better as compared to this year. Due to the pandemic and restrictions on social gatherings, people usually purchase them in smaller quantities to enjoy with few people and families at home,” she said.

“Unlike last year where people were having Valentine parties with chocolates, which induced them to purchase in higher quantities, the story is different this year.”

Ms Vida Anim, a trader at Lapaz, who decided to sell Valentine’s Day presents in addition to her usual sale of bedroom slippers, said although sales were moving slowly, she believed the situation would change on Sunday, February 14, as many people would purchase the presents for their loved ones.

Madam Victoria Tunde, a retailer of chocolate in Accra, said the product run out of stock from the beginning of the week, a situation which had resulted in scuffles amongst retailers, who had to struggle to get some to sell.

“When we go to COCOBOD to purchase them to sell, some retailers end up arguing and fighting with one another because everyone wants to get it to make some profits during the season as customers keep asking for it,” she explained.

Golden Tree chocolate, a product of the CPC, comes in varied flavours and types including Kingsbite milk chocolate, Portem Nut, Oranco, Akuafo Bar, Coffee Choc, Portem Pride, and Pebbles.

Jay-Z And Jack Dorsey Invested $23 Million To Develop Bitcoin In Indian And African Countries

 Jay-Z has been making a lot of business endeavor as of late. The rapper recently launched his own brand of cannabis and signed on to a new at-home workout startup. But now, he’s linking up with Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey for an innovative project. The two billionaires are set out on a new mission: to make Bitcoin the official currency of the internet.

Jay-Z and Dorsey have both invested $23 million in Bitcoin to start the development of cryptocurrency in other countries. Dorsey was the first to share the news, which he of course did on his Twitter page. “JAY-Z and I are giving 500 BTC to a new endowment named ₿trust to fund #Bitcoin development, initially focused on teams in Africa & India,” he wrote. “It‘ll be set up as a blind irrevocable trust, taking zero direction from us.” Dorsey also added that they are looking for three board members and attached an application form to his tweet.

Dorsey and Jay-Z’s new Bitcoin program wouldn’t be the first time the two billionaires have worked together. Back in December, Bloomberg reported that Dorsey’s company Square was in talks to buy Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming platform. Purchasing the platform would be a way for Square to “diversify” their assets. It would also be potentially beneficial to Tidal, who have not released their year-end figures since reporting they had 3 million paying customers back in 2016.

Gender identity bill divides Spain’s feminists, left-wing

 Victòria Martínez continues to sign official documents with the name that she, her partner and their two daughters ditched four years ago. Barring any surprises, she expects the Spanish government to recognize her as Victòria by May, closing a patience-wearing chapter familiar to transgender people around the world.

Changing her legal identity at a civil registry office in Barcelona will allow Martínez to update her passport and driver’s license and to carry a health card that correctly states she is a woman. But the process, which the pandemic prolonged, has been, in her words, “humiliating” — requiring a psychiatric diagnosis, reports from three doctors and a court’s approval.

“Did I want to be stigmatized by being labeled as crazy? Did I want to voluntarily apply for a shrink’s report that says so, to have a judge decide whether I can be what I already am?” Martínez, 44, recalls asking herself. “The whole thing has been emotionally exhausting.”

A new law proposed by the far-left party in Spain’s coalition government would make it easier for residents to change genders for official purposes. A bill sponsored by Equality Minister Irene Montero aims to make gender self-determination — no diagnosis, medical treatment or judge required — the norm, with eligibility starting at age 16. Nearly 20 countries, eight of them in the European Union, already have similar laws.

Factions of the Catholic Church and the far-right have focused their opposition to the bill on the fact that it also would allow children under 16 to bypass parental objections and seek a judge’s assistance in accessing treatment for gender dysphoria, the medical term for the psychological distress that results from a conflict between an individual’s identity and birth-assigned sex.

Less expected has been the fierce resistance from some feminists and from within Spain’s Socialist-led government.

“I’m fundamentally worried by the idea that if gender can be chosen with no more than one’s will or desire, that could put at risk the identity criteria for 47 million Spaniards,” Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, a veteran Socialist and women’s rights advocate, said last week.

Opponents argue that allowing people to choose their gender eventually would lead to “erasing” women from the public sphere: if more Spaniards registered male at birth switch to female, they say, it would skew national statistics and create more competition among women for everything from jobs to sports trophies.

The divide in Spain mirrors a debate between a branch of feminist theorists and LGBTQ rights movements around the globe. At one end, activists often derogatorily referred to as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) posit that the advancement of transgender rights could undercut efforts to root out sexism and misogyny by negating the existence of biological sexes.

The State Federation of Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bisexual people says that if passed in its current form, the law would help end discrimination against transgender people and leapfrog Spain to the European vanguard of protecting LGBTQ rights.

Montero’s bill nonetheless has provoked unusual fury on online platforms, where critics express alarm over provisions that would assign public toilets and prisons according to “registered gender.” Confluencia Feminista, an alliance of dozens of women’s rights organizations, also has come out against any changes to Spain’s existing law.

The concern of Alexandra Paniagua, one of the new platform’s activists, pivots around the idea that by eliminating the opinions of doctors and judges, state-subsidized hormones and gender reassignment surgery would become more available, ultimately “promoting” more dysphoria among young people.

“More people will see easier access to the invasive treatment, especially girls who have been told that their bodies are less worthy in our society,” she said.

But Trans Platform Federation President Mar Cambrollé argues that some of the fears cited as reasons to keep existing hurdles in place are based on outdated ideas that reduce boys and girls, men and women to a handful of socially prescribed characteristics and roles.

“Transphobic attitudes piss me off,” Cambrollé said. “As a woman, I’ve been discriminated against for being a woman in a world made by men for men, but also by cis(gender) people who build it with other cis people in mind.”

Finding a compromise any time soon looks like an insurmountable task judging by the virulence of the debate online. Cambrollé has sued 85-year-old Lidia Falcón, the founder of Spain’s Feminist Party, for repeatedly saying that transgender and gay people promote pedophilia; prosecutors are investigating Falcón’s statements as a possible hate crime.

Ángela Rodríguez, an advisor to Montero on LGBTQ issues, said the bill’s timing has added to the tension, with International Women’s Day coming up on March 8.

“There is a dispute for the hegemony of the message in the feminist movement,” Rodríguez said during a recent panel discussion.

What for many is a theoretical debate is painfully real to Martínez, who has closed most of her social media accounts. She says the constant chatter feels both too “personal” and “perverse, generalizing about what a trans person is.”

“Unfortunately, to this day, it’s still easier for people who stare at you when you are walking down the street and they can reconcile a certain type of face with a pair of tits,” said Martínez, who wears round-edged glasses and her hair in a bob to soften her sharp facial contours.

To come out as transgender, first to herself and then to her partner, required Martínez to grow a kind of confidence that wasn’t part of growing up as a boy in 1980s Spain. There were suicide attempts before she started living as Victòria, and she doesn’t consider herself brave.

“For me,” she said, “there just wasn’t any other choice.”

Yet Martínez hesitated over taking hormones and updating her civil registry record. She fought hard to be proud of the woman she is, with a deep voice and a way of carrying herself that stands out. Didn’t she want to break with traditional gender molds, including expectations that transgender women should embody stereotypical femininity?

In the end, she decided it would be easier to navigate the world with a more socially conforming appearance and an identity card that confirms she is female, even if that meant bowing down to existing legal requirements and the notions of people who still think in binary terms.

“I lived 40 years in hiding,” she said. “Now I protect myself, but I don’t hide.”

 

MADRID (AP)