13/09/2026
Who Gets to Become a Programmer?
On World Programmers' Day, most of what gets published celebrates the profession we already have. I want to spend this piece on the profession we are failing to build.
I am a systems analyst by training. Long before I built an AI tutor, I spent years learning to read a system, to see where it works and where it quietly breaks. That habit of mind is the same one every good programmer needs, and it is formed years before anyone touches a line of code.
Here is the uncomfortable part. In South Africa, eighty percent of Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning. A large majority of Grade 5 and Grade 9 learners do not reach basic maths benchmarks.
Globally, three hundred million children cannot read or do basic mathematics at all. Programming is built on exactly these two foundations, language and logic, so a foundational literacy and numeracy crisis is not separate from the future pipeline of programmers. It is the pipeline problem.
We talk a great deal about closing the digital skills gap. Coding curricula, robotics clubs, hackathons for teenagers, all worthwhile. But a child who reaches Grade 8 without being able to reason confidently in the language of instruction, or hold a number in their head long enough to manipulate it, will not be rescued by a coding club. We are trying to teach the advanced skill while the foundational one is still missing underneath it, in classrooms of forty and fifty children, often in a language that is not the child's home language.
I know this personally, not abstractly. My own school career nearly ended in grade 3, the day a classroom laughed at me for giving an oral in a language I couldn't yet speak well enough, and that my parents had no ability to help me with. I did not stop being capable that day. I stopped volunteering information. It took me until my thirties to stand up and speak in front of a room again without flinching. I was not less intelligent than the child next to me. I was less supported, in the language that mattered in that room.
That is why I don't think the story of who becomes a programmer is really a story about coding education at all. It is a story about whether a child gets to keep believing they belong in the room long enough to discover they are good at logic, at systems, at language, at the things programming is actually made of.
This is also why I am cautious about how our industry talks about AI in education. An AI that hands a struggling student the instant answer is not closing this gap. It is papering over it, and producing a generation that looks capable until you take the tool away. The AI that will actually widen who gets to become a programmer is the one that does what a good teacher does, asks the next question instead of giving the answer, meets a child in their own language, and builds the reasoning muscle rather than replacing it.
So on World Programmers' Day, I want to celebrate something slightly different to the usual list of languages and frameworks. I want to celebrate the very first moment any of us, in any language, on any continent, worked something out for ourselves instead of being handed the answer. That moment is where every programmer actually starts. Right now, too many of our children are being quietly filtered out of that moment before they ever reach a keyboard.
Building the next generation of African programmers does not start with more coding classes. It starts with making sure every child gets to keep asking questions, in a language they understand, for long enough to find out what they are capable of.
Leora Hessen Founder and CEO, Hello Aida
https://helloaida.ai/for-parents
