Reprograma is a social impact startup focused on teaching programming to cisgender and transgender women who are unemployed and haven’t had the resources, opportunities or support to learn how to code. We offer an 18-week bootcamp course that teaches our students how to program. Female role models from top tech companies (IBM, Google Campus, ThoughtWorks, etc.) offer them mentorship throughout the program, and we also organize visits to startups and tech companies (Nubank, Microsoft, LinkedIn, etc.) to help our students understand first-hand what it means to work in this sector. Throughout the course we also teach them methodologies such as UX Design, Agile Thinking and Design Sprint helping them develop a different way of problem solving and solution thinking. We want to make sure that our students have the necessary skills and tools to put their own ideas into paper, and then use technology to develop them. The program also prepares them for the market by helping them create a work portfolio and LinkedIn profile, draft their CVs, train on interviews and, more importantly, believe in their capacity to become powerful creators of technology. We reprogram the way in which they see themselves as strong contributors of the tech sector.

https://www.facebook.com/ReprogramaBr/

• Brazil

• Women
• The unemployed
• Remote and rural communities

Given the success of our first course back in May 2016, we have replicated the program another four times, having rolled it out five times since we began. We are also scaling up out program to increase scope and impact. We have had a significant demand from other Brazilian cities – faraway places like Belém, Recife, Belo Horizonte and Curitiba – from women inspired by our work and who want to participate in our program. They have reached out asking that we bring {reprograma} to their states. As a response we are launching a distance learning program in September funded with an award we received in June from Fundação Arymax. It entails an 8-week distance learning course which we will implement with a partner that has fifteen years of experience on online learning. We plan on rolling out the program twice within the next calendar year, allowing us to reach at least an additional 60 women per year (30 per program). By reaching women in remote areas in Brazil through online learning, we will be spreading our mission to places that would otherwise be hard to reach. Another way in which we are scaling up our work is through the implementation of a 12-week night course for women who cannot attend our bootcamp course, also to be rolled out in September 2018. The latter will be focused on back-end programming and funded with the support of two current partners – Facebook and Accenture.

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