KamiLimu Program: eLimu Kamili for Computer Science and Information Technology students

An organization in a mission on Building Skills and Changing lives of Kenyan students

Hello world, today we're heading on to a workshop to know what, how and why KamiLimu. Class has never been so educative and fun at the same time but now it is and more so building skills and changing lives. For a long time not only in Kenya it has been hard for Computer Science and Information Technology students to go through some problems given in class, you can look for someone to guide you through but most times in vain. YouTube, Stack Overflow and other sites have been a programmer's guide through problems and in the end you might pass the unit but without any much understanding - many graduands have graduated and ended up doing something else. KamiLimu has and is sorting that. Let us know what KamiLimu is, how it's sorting that out and why.

First of all the name, KamiLimu comes from two Swahili words ‘Kamili’ meaning Complete and ‘Limu’, which is a contraction of ‘ELimu’ meaning Education in English respectively making the slogan "eLimu Kamili.

KamiLimu is a free 6-8 month structured mentorship program that seeks to augment classroom learning for Computer Science students at Kenyan universities.

The program was founded in September 2016 by Dr. Chao Mbogho with cohort 1.0 of 33 students from 4 universities. Now two and a half years old, 96 students, over 40 professional mentors, 6 industry partnerships, a stronger team and structure later Dr. Chao and her team launched cohort 4.0 earlier this year 2019. 44 more mentees, 13 peer mentors, and over 20 new professionals to the dubbed KamiLimu 4.0, #KamiLimuLaunch - 50:50 female to male students ratio. KamiLimu has so far changed the lives of over 150 Kenyan Computer Science (C.S) and Information Technology (I.T) students with over 100 alumni, sponsored over 5 students to attend tech events abroad and 4 students have directly benefited from the scholarship essay writing training by winning international awards and scholarships since its first launch. What an amazing journey right? Now let's get to know how they have managed to reach that far and still powering on.

How? Since September 2016 a total of 95 computing students have taken part in the free mentorship program in KamiLimu 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and now #KamiLimuLaunch 4.0 takes up the number to 44 more students. KamiLimu does this by offering an 8 - month curriculum - currently more revised than before with 1 on 1 professional mentor-ship of 1 to 2 students per mentor the whole year.
KamiLimu is supported by 5 pillars: Innovation and ICT skills, Professional development, personal development, community development, and scholarship application and awareness. All 5 pillars are rooted in all the activities KamiLimu does.

Major activities during the 8 - month curriculum are:

Workshops.
Guest talks by industry professionals.
Community involvement.
Peer training classes.
Peer mentorship meetings.
Online-based reviews.

All of the above are hands-on learning and immersive mentorship sessions and industrial visits to IT companies, which are facilitated by the peer trainers who are students in the mentorship program, mentors, experienced professionals from the industries then lastly the mentees have a meet with the senior mentor Dr. Chao. This form of mentorship has helped many students grow both in class and career-wise. With the industrial visits and professional mentors from different tech companies, mentees end up doing tech and innovating after graduating.

Community development activities have also been a big boost to the mentees and mentors too. KamiLimu has a big heart, it not only focuses on itself but also the community and this is another part I love. Students in the program give back to the community through volunteer work at local tech spaces and training others on digital skills. This has enabled them to be involved in various events like the 2016 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference, 2017 Africa Code Week, and 2017 Next Einstein Forum (NEF) Science Week among others.

Why? KamiLimu's vision is to be a premier program that upskills university tech students in order to foster their global competitiveness.

My small take: Am very proud of KamiLimu's progress and how much it has helped many tech students. When I heard of it's start I was living and studying in Nakuru, Kenya and also working on a startup - Narcet Hub. Being a lover of tech and innovation, I was happy and wished it well. It wasn't far from how I envisioned my own startup to end up to be. Supporting people's growth is what I love doing and seeing that being done is awesome. Let me leave you with words from Dr. Chao...

"I want to be remembered for showing that it is not enough to unlock potential, we have to open the entire door."
— Dr. (@chao_mbogho) March 23, 2018

Want to join KamiLimu? Contact @KamiLimu on Twitter. Send us your comments on the comments section below and also you can email us at jtechpreneur@gmail.com. Subscribe to the blog and get updates plus follow us on Social Media all as JTechpreneur. Until next time, Peace.