Pedro Baumann Cornejo: “Learning to program can change anybody’s life”

Estacion La Paz is the first project by Via Codigo, a Peruvian organisation that carries out educational projects to develop transversal (instrumental, interpersonal and systemic) and specific competences (in this case, web programming). The project is addressed toteenagers who are serving time for specific criminal offenses in the Youth Centers for Diagnosis and Rehabilitation (CJDR) in Lima. The Via Codigo team noticed that even though these teenagers were at very important formative stages in their life, they didn’t get any kind of job training as was the case of older adults. So taking advantage of the fact that programmers are in great professional demand, they used Coding as the driving force to develop both technical and human competences for the teens’ social, work and family reinsertion, reducing in this way their recidivism rates as well as the divide through a digital inclusion program.