8/n #Burundi After yesterday's thread, a lot have asked me my take on "mentorship/accompagnement" for youth in this IT industry and I have my bit of opinion on this. Again, as I said, you need to understand the mindset here: a young trainee will come to you the Burundian way
9/n We @UbuViz have been running a program for over 2 years where we take in interns from different universities of #Bujumbura and teach them the basics of professional programming. Most of them never come up with their own ideas 🤷. That's the #Burundi-an way 😎 😂.
10/n We are accustomed to be told what to do by our parents, teacher, priests/pastors, gov ... we forget that in IT, Innovative ideas are kings. How do you mentor future young developers/entrepreneurs to think outside of the box in #Burundi ?
11/n my solution has been always to push young developers to use open source softwares and "customize" it for the #Burundi environment. When you are able to see what is behind all these softwares we daily use, you understand that there's nothing special about it. You can do it 🤷
12/n also I usually recommend young interns to switch to using English in your search on Google, in your coding... Forget about French. 🙈😂 That alone is hampering #Burundi an developers and depriving them from accessing good opportunities abroad.
13/n We, Burundian are so pessimistic we kind of like to enumerate problems and feel good when pitied for. So the first step is teaching a young intern to always mention a solution she/he come up with before mentioning its problem. Pessimistic person make me 🤮.
14/n But one of the cute sins that we have is the propensity to copy somewhere a solution and to be satisfied with this minimal work of copying. Without bringing any added value/innovation. That's why I said yesterday that talking about innovative startups in #Burundi is a joke.
15/n Everyone laments that in #Burundi, if you open a shop, right next to you another Burundian will copy you and open a shop that sells the same products! Well then. Imagine this state of mind is present in the interns that we receive from universities in town.
16/n A trainee like to program in this language, because it is the one he learnt at university & knows it is used in town. We try as hard as we can to explain to him that going off the beaten track will do him more good than being stuck in old technology.
17/n Learning a new programming language allows him/her to stimulate his/her understanding of the IT domain, to approach a problem from another angle and in any case he/she must think that he/she can work even outside #Burundi like we did. Why deny yourself opportunities?
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