Gaza City academy hopes its hi-tech business model will be immune to physical barriers to trade
© Gaza Sky CodersInside the Gaza coding school. Photograph: Gaza Sky Coders
It's a scene straight from a Silicon Valley startup.
Hot-desking twentysomethings type code into laptops covered with stickers. Retro Pac-Man graffiti and motivational slogans like "DO EPIC THINGS" adorn the walls. Bookshelves are filled with the tech classics: The Facebook Effect and The Founder's Dilemmas. Wifi routers hang overhead, as do Edison bulbs, emitting more style than actual light.
But this is not the San Francisco Bay Area. No electric cars quietly whirr by.
Instead, this is Gaza, with its cracked streets and checkpoints manned by militants. On the perimeter of this impoverished coastal enclave are Israel and Egypt, countries that have blockaded this tiny slice of land for years.
Tight restrictions on the movement of goods and, vitally, people, have been the death of much industry here. But Gaza's first coding academy hopes its hi-tech business model - which operates in the virtual rather than real world - will be somewhat immune to physical barriers to trade.
"That's the reason we started this. It ignores boundaries," says 31-year-old Ghada Ibrahim, who was in the first class of coders, which started a year ago.
"The blockade is a huge factor. It's a reason why we have a lot of people who have come to sign up."
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