Libya : Najla Al-Missalati, a social improvement through coding and programming

Najla Al-Missalati is a Libyan woman who cares about her fellow countrymen. She founded “She Codes”, and acts in order to enable social improvement through coding and programming.

Najla Al-Missalati is from Libya and is one of those young people who put their efforts into the reconstruction of their country and who dream of a promising future, in a context that is unstable and complex. Najla was born in Benghazi and has always been a techie. She earned a degree in telecommunications from the Benghazi University, before combining her passion with a keen interest in training, education and counseling.

Najla has always been sensitive to the future of her compatriots and made an edifying statement: Libyan women participate very little in the labor market. In the field of programming, the number of working women is even proving extremely low. Convinced that this will offer them better job prospects, she started and founded “She Codes”, which is a project with a social purpose. The main objective is to support and strengthen the technical skills of women to arm them for professional opportunities.

At the launch of “She Codes”, Najla didn’t have much skills, but was nevertheless convinced that she’d succeed and did what she could with what she had. She has thus collected training courses on coding and programming on the Internet, by exploring the documentation provided by the African Association for the Development of Entrepreneurship and the SLEISDE project financed by the European Union. Najla Al-Missalati then used the example of similar experiences and launched a Bootcamp in which more than 300 women registered. Out of those, 20 women were chosen, and benefited from four weeks of intensive training at the Benghazi Development Center.

And Najla doesn’t intend to stop there. She aims to reach 700 women by the end of 2019, and hopes to train up to 2,600 women over the next five years, generating a minimum of 1,000 jobs. A commendable initiative that we highly encourage !

Yassine Benslimane

Africa Women Experts