The Latin American ’Laba’ Where Women Are Learning to Code Across the Employment Gap Whitney Eulich - The Christian Science Monitor
go to original May 12, 2017

Laboratoria, code that transforms (Laboratoria Perú)

Laboratoria reaches out to promising young women with few resources and teaches them skills to enter better-paid career tracks, whether or not they've completed their formal education. For many participants, the training has resulted in a full-time job and a new sense of confidence. But the organization is also a "lab," pioneering a new model of education for skills that are increasingly in demand in Latin America. That could prove particularly useful in a region dogged by sky-high secondary school drop-out rates, where students often express a sense of disconnect between their education and the job market.

According to 2013 International Labor Organization numbers, some 130 million Latin Americans work in the informal sector, including cleaning homes or selling food on the street, leaving them without safety nets like health insurance or pensions, and with few opportunities to move ahead. What’s more, nearly 20 million people in the region between the ages of 15 and 24 are neither in school nor employed, according to the World Bank. Women make up two-thirds of that population.

While there are a number of organizations working with governments across Latin America to try to improve public education, the region is struggling to create a globally competitive workforce. And women, the poor, and other minority groups are particularly hard hit when it comes to the gap between education and labor market demands.



“In a region where quality education is limited to the elite, most people are denied opportunities because they are denied education,” says Gabriela Rocha, the Mexico executive director of Laboratoria. The tech field is attractive for its high wages, the demand for trained web developers world-wide, and because jobs frequently don’t require formal education, so long as applicants have the needed skills.

“A job interview often consists of opening up a computer and asking the candidate to code,” Ms. Rocha says.

Read the rest at The Christian Science Monitor

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