NEWS POST: The 17-Year-Old Google Coding Winner Whose Cameroonian Hometown Has Been Cut Off From The Internet

Cameroonian Google coding champ Nji Collins Gbah was cut off by the disruption (NJI COLLINS GBAH)

Nji Collins Gbah is one lucky teenager. In Nov. 2016, the tech enthusiast from Bamenda, Cameroon, started participating in the Google Code-in competition. The global online contest introduces pre-university students aged 13 to 17 to the world of open source, and Gbah, now 17, was participating for the second and last time.

In 2016 alone, over 1,300 students from 62 countries took part in the competition. In total, they completed more than 6,400 tasks related to coding, research, documentation, quality assurance and improving user interfaces. During the seven-week program, Gbah completed 20 tasks using the Open Medical Record System, or OpenMRS, a platform that focuses on improving healthcare service in developing countries.

“I was anxious,” Gbah wrote in a blog post published a day before the deadline on Jan. 16. But “I had to find ways to turn my nervousness into creativity and fun.” Gbah said that he chose to participate with OpenMRS “because the whole idea of writing code to save lives was really amazing and I wanted to be part of it.”

But one day after the competition ended, the government shutdown the internet in Bamenda, Gbah’s hometown and the capital of the northwest region. The shutdown also affected the southwest region and was instituted following protests in the two Anglophone regions against marginalization from the French-dominated government. Since then, the shutdown has drawn criticism from digital advocacy groups, and from United Nations experts, who have called it “an appalling violation” to freedom of expression.

First among equals. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

But on Jan. 30, almost two weeks into the blackout, Gbah was selected as one of 34 winners—and the first African (SEE STORY 2) —of the annual competition. His story, that of a young developer winning an esteemed hacking award, has been used as a rallying point for those campaigning against the shutdown. During the upcoming summer, Gbah alongside the other winners will be spending time at the Google campus in California, and meet with the tech company’s engineers.

“This is great news” for the tech community in Cameroon, says Kenneth Ngah, a tech entrepreneur who established platforms like LCM Tours and No Kid Behind. “It is a moment we will encourage non-tech enthusiasts to get into the field and advance it.”

The internet shutdown has been crippling the tech industry in Cameroon, known as the Silicon Mountain. Many start-ups which are based in cities like Buea have stopped their operations or had to move to other big cities like Douala and Yaoundé, where the internet connection is still accessible.

“Without the internet, it’s like killing the community people have toiled for years to build up,” says Angela Lumneh, who financed and created Opportunity Space, an app that enables Cameroonians to find scholarships abroad.

Founders like Ayuk Etta, whose company Skylabase provides software to financial solutions, have even been thinking of moving out of the country. Etta says that they have lost US$6,500 since the shutdown, and he has to commute the over 70-kilometer distance to Douala every day just to connect to the internet.

“Maybe we will have to leave the country to a more suitable country which has a better ecosystem to support technology business,” he said.

Taking to the streets - Bamenda, Cameroon. (Reuters/Stringer)

NEWS POST: 17 Year-Old Cameroonian Developer Is First African To Win Google Code-In Competition

On the 30th of January 2017, Google announced winners and finalists of ‘Google Code-in’ (CGI) via a blog post. According to the announcement, 1,340 students from 62 countries had completed 6,418 tasks to bring the competition to a close. 

Every year, Google hosts the Google Code-in allowing teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 especially pre-university students complete tasks specified by partner open source organizations which include Drupal, Wikimedia and Sugar Labs among others.

Of the hundreds that participated, 34 teenagers completed 842 tasks to emerge grand price winners. And one of the winners is a Cameroonian reportedly marking the continent’s debut in the global competition.

Nji Collins is an art inclined final-year high-schooler who loves contributing to Open Source projects and is interested in technology-related knowledge especially web development. ‘Collin Grimm‘, as his online alias goes, participated in Google Code-in with OpenMRS; an open source enterprise electronic medical record system platform.

According to a blog post documenting the CGI experience, Collins Nji recalls that this was his second and final time in the competition as participants are only allowed a two-time chance of participation.

Screenshot of the OpenMRS Atlas - https://atlas.openmrs.org/

The 34 teenage grand prize winners had completed 842 assigned tasks in total. According to Google, each of the winners will be flown to the Google Campus for four days to meet and interact with Google engineers and have a feel of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Google Code-in first kicked off as the now defunct Google Highly Open Participation Contest that was discontinued in 2008. The 1,340 students that jointly completed 6,480 tasks in 2016 were the largest turnout witnessed by the competition since it started in 2010.

Originally published (STORY 1) on QUARTZ AFRICA and (STORY 2) on TECHPOINT