For the first time a 17 year old High school student from Bamenda emerged as the first Black and African to be a Grand Prize Winner for the Google Code-In 2016 contest. Opportunities continue to be offered in Africa especially in the IT and Tech sector for the youth. One of the projects that has been in play is the Google In Contest that has been introducing Pre-university students aged between 13 and 17 into open source development. They are provided with bit-sized tasks which are evaluated and given a score throughout a three month period. As there was a recent Internet shutdown in Cameroon, the Silicon Mountain tech ecosystem was affected. This is when 17 year old Collins Nji was forced to travel to a nearby city of Bafoussam to do follow up work on the contest.
He stated that although he was nervous he managed to transform that to creativity and fun. On January 30th as the winners were announced Collins was one of the 34th Grand prize winners and will soon be traveling to the Google headquarters at Mountain View to meet the software Engineering and Infrastructure team together with other members of the Google Open Source Programs office. The trip will be a great cultural experience for all the winners that come from everywhere in the world. Collin’s victory has only began and will be a big boost to the young African hacker community and other like minded hackers will strive to attain heights.