Four internships working on Experian’s United for Financial Health programme to help communities recover financially from Covid-19

Four Code First Girls graduates have joined Experian to play an important role in developing its United for Financial Health projects in Italy and South Africa.

The graduates will provide Experian with their coding skills and a new perspective on how best to tackle financial exclusion and help communities recover from Covid-19.

Experian is sponsoring the four Code First Girls graduates to complete their Nanodegrees between now and January 2022.

Two of the coders are in the UK, one is in Kenya and one in South Africa. They join Experian as paid graduate interns in EMEA, where they will work on United for Financial Health projects in Italy and South Africa.

Experian will also partner with Code First Girls to host a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on October 28. The free one-off taster session is designed for complete beginners and will provide them with examples of leveraging data for good.

Rhona Moodly, HR Director for EMEA at Experian, said: “The United for Financial Health programme is designed to level the playing field for people who are financially excluded, especially as economies recover from the pandemic. We recognise the scale of the challenge means we need to find the best in young tech talent. The Code First Girls graduates will give us a new outlook on the problems we need to solve together, and we know they will achieve so much in their time with us.”

Anna Brailsford, CEO at Code First Girls, said: “We are delighted to see the impact that our partnership with Experian is already having on women around the globe. Opportunities like these internships give Code First Girls graduates the chance to continue improving their skills and get real-world experience of what its like to work in an international business environment. These transformational stories are vital to give women the fair advantage, and their work will have life-changing impact for the individuals involved, their families, and their communities.”

As part of the United for Financial Health programme in Italy, Experian works with two non-profit organisations to create a new credit assessment. It will help people, including the unbanked, who have little or no financial track record and find it difficult to access mainstream financial services.

The coders will help develop the IncludiMi app, which will enable credit ‘invisibles’, including the unbanked, to calculate their financial health using non-traditional data.

While in South Africa, they will be working on a project in partnership with the National Small Business Chamber to educate business owners on their financial and credit health. It will empower them to improve their personal and business credit profiles and improve their chances of accessing funding to run or grow their companies.