Alibaba Cloud launches “Tech for Change” to enable 1 million young women coders by 2030

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud-computing arm of Alibaba Group, today announced the Tech for Change initiative calling for inspiring ideas and joint efforts from enterprises, start-ups and young entrepreneurs, to tackle global social and humanitarian challenges in areas such as education, economic development and the environment through technologies.

Alibaba Cloud will contribute to the initiative by offering partners with access to its technology expertise, global computing resources and talent development programs including Alibaba Cloud Academy and its AI competition platform Tianchi.

One of the first partnerships of the Tech for Change initiative is aimed at supporting female education across the world. The first collaboration revealed at the MWC is with iamtheCODE, the first African-led global movement to mobilise governments, businesses and the philanthropic foundation on STEAMED (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, Entrepreneurship, and Design) education. The partnership will support young women programmers in marginalised communities through free online training and free access to cloud computing resources, with the aim to enable one million woman and girl coders by the year 2030.

“Through the Tech for Change initiative, we want to bring together creativity and innovation to tackle critical problems and challenges faced by humanity such as equality in education, healthcare for the underprivileged, sustainable agriculture and wildlife protection,” said Dr Wanli Min, Chief Machine Intelligence Scientist, Alibaba Cloud. “By making technology more accessible and affordable, we can inspire creativity and nurture the next generation of game-changers who will make our world a better place.”

“As an advocate for applying technologies for the social good, we believe that affordable cloud infrastructure and accessible intelligent technologies have the potential to enable smaller organisations to make huge differences in creating a better world for all humankind.” Min added, “We are calling for everyone to join forces and be part of the Tech for Change global community.”

Under the partnership with iamtheCODE, Alibaba Cloud will provide tailored courses on a range of topics including cloud computing, data analysis, machine learning and security. iamtheCODE will also add Alibaba Cloud on their blended curriculum, as certificates will be awarded to young women students who pass the course to help them along with their career path towards engineering and other practical subjects. To date over 13,000 girls have access to the iamtheCODE Curriculum. In addition, each enrolled student will be offered free access to cloud computing resources during their study.