Emmanuella Mayaki, a thirteen-year-old Nigerian girl, has set a new record as one of the youngest persons to be accepted into a university in the United States.
According to reports, Mayaki was accepted into the Programme for the Exceptionally Gifted at Mary Baldwin University, US, to study Computer Science in the spring.
Mayaki’s letter of admission was made available to reporters.
The letter reads, “
Dear Emmanuella, congratulations on your acceptance to the Programme for the Exceptionally Gifted at Mary Baldwin University! Welcome to the PEG class of 2026.”
She scored a 91 percentile mark of 1,300 on her Scholastic Aptitude Test. One of Mayaki’s accomplishments at age 11, in the year 2020, was the opening of an Information Communications Technology Academy for girls in Abuja, Nigeria.
The academy was her mission to provide sustainable empowerment for the girl child to acquire digital skills and close the gap in digital literacy, and for training and equipping youngsters with digital technology.
Mayaki said the academy had a vision of securing the future of the girl-child. The academy, named ‘CodeKid’, was set up to train the girl-child on the basics of computer literacy from simple Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint functions to the more complex skills like programming and coding.
The young tech developer and programmer has always nursed a strong drive to share knowledge and positively impact people, especially the girl-child.
This led to her decision to launch the after-school, weekend, and holiday clubs in Nigeria.
Emmanuella noted that this programming school was influenced by her experience with the United Kingdom after-school club experience, which she successfully duplicated in Nigeria.
Her focus is on the girl-child who falls within the age range of 6 to 15, which includes a beginners’ class in Information and Communications Technology.
Here, newbies to the endless possibilities of the ICT are tutored on Introduction to Computer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Desktop Publishing, WordPress, Graphics design, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL, among others such as object-oriented programming – Python and Java.
Story: Ralia Adama