Gaza code school hopes to sidestep siege
Academy hopes its hitech business model will be immune to physical barriers to trade
Hot-desking twentysomethings type code into laptops covered with stickers. Retro Pac-Man graffiti and motivational slogans like “DO EPIC THINGS” adorn the walls.
Bookshelves are filled with the tech classics: The Facebook Effect and The Founder’s Dilemmas. WiFi routers hang overhead, as do Edison bulbs, emitting more style than actual light.
But this is not the San Francisco Bay Area. No electric cars quietly whirr by.
Instead, this is Gaza, which has been under crippling Israeli siege since 2007.
But Gaza’s first coding academy hopes its hi-tech business model — which operates in the virtual rather than real world — will be somewhat immune to physical barriers to trade.
Ignoring boundaries
“That’s the reason we started this. It ignores boundaries,” says 31-year-old Ghada Ebrahim, who was in the first class of coders, which started a year ago.
With funding from international charities such as Mercy Corps and significant tech world players such as Google, the academy provides two basic requirements its students need for a freelance career developing websites and apps: internet and electricity.
In Gaza, that means paying for a generator to supply 10 hours of laptop juice a day.
“We do something that no one can cut off,” Ebrahim says, then stops herself midsentence and pauses for a few seconds. Israel provides Gaza’s internet, and as yet has never cut it off.
Sixteen students (half female as a rule) enrolled in the first class, which had international support from Founders & Coders, a UK-based non-profit providing free coding lessons.
Each student is trained how to pitch to international clients and use job-finding websites such as Upwork, a global freelancing platform.
For real-world practice during the course, local businesses and charities are offered pro bono web development work.
And, crucially, Gaza Sky Geeks helps its graduates get paid, in a place that many financial institutions avoid for fears of money laundering, not to mention the fact that its de facto government has been on a US “foreign terrorist” blacklist since 1997.