Meet The Girls Solving The World's Problems In CODEGIRL

Meet the girls solving the world's problems in CODEGIRL, a documentary released this week on YouTube, and available to view for free until this Thursday. The film follows teams of high school aged girls from Moldova to Brazil developing apps to address global needs – starting in their own backyard. The winning team gets $10,000 to complete their app and launch it, but as the film unfolds we see that for many of the girls, the payoff comes well before the winners are announced. Filmmaker Lesley Chilcott, who directed “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman,” shadows the girls in the run-up to the Technovation Challenge. The international competition aims to encourage girls to enter the typically male-dominant field of coding.

The low number of women working in tech and the disparity between female founders who receive funding and men is nothing new. By 2017, the app market will be valued at $ 77 billion and Technovation estimates over 80% of developers are male. For the past six years, the girls-only challenge, sponsored and run by non-profit Iridescent, has awarded and empowered girls from around the globe to raise awareness of science, tech, engineering and math education. In other words, making tech accessible to girls.

In the 108-minute film we meet the girls aged 10-18, who get together with each other and a local mentor, before and after school for three months to create a winning app that solves a problem in their community.

We see girls from Brazil creating an educational mobile game about preserving water and energy, in Mexico, they develop an app for identifying domestic violence and girls in Northern California come up with an Air BnB for household goods allowing neighbors to rent lawnmowers and other appliances from one another. Team Charis from Nigeria comes up with an app for garbage collection. Another team develops a drunk driving detector app - the first to equate the effect of a sleepless night with drinking units. Eighteen hours without sleep, we learn, has the equivalent impact to 3 units of alcohol.

Beyond their ideas, it’s the interaction with each other, and discoveries about themselves that makes the film so delightful. The girls cheer each other on, and create their own community, heaping praise and pep talks.

“Part of being a female programmer is being really lonely. Other girls don't share the same interests,” says one.

Another sits down with the group and asks, “Okay, what are we going to get done tonight? The website, coding?”

An American team expresses compassion and pragmatism; they are willing to lose so that girls from third-world countries can put their prize money to use addressing basic needs.

Making the finals means a trip to Silicon Valley to pitch their startups to a panel of judges. For one team of girls, it’s their first time on an airplane.

The Technovation Challenge has created the world's largest pool of women who know how to launch a tech startup. It’s something the girls are proud of – even those who didn’t make it to the finals.

“The best part for me is that I found out I like to do this. I really like it and I’m going to keep doing it,” said one member of an eliminated team.

The girls are invigorated and it’s infectious. They’re told to keep in touch with judges, to pursue more ideas, more apps, and internships.

“We learned not just about the technology, but about the business, the marketing and how to get a business started,” says another team member after elimination in the final round.

CODEGIRL and the Technovation Challenge is girl power at it’s best.

The film opens in theatres on Friday.