Facebook has invested 1 million U.S. dollars in projects aiming to help women and underrepresented minorities get better education on computer science, a U.S. non-profit said Wednesday.
The Facebook funds will allow more than 1,000 female and minority students to attend courses on computer science each semester next year, said CodePath.org, the non-profit organization that received the investment from the world's largest social media network.
"The funding will also allow us to create courses that target underrepresented minorities and women during their freshman year and expand our number of college partners," CodePath.org founder Michael Ellison said
The courses will help the students build capacities by teaching them relevant expertise, including computer coding skills needed by tech companies, in their future career, he added.
CodePath.org has partnered with more than 23 universities on its curriculum programs, and those schools included Jackson State University, Mississippi State and Texas A&M University in Texas State, Ellison said.
Over 1,700 students from over 30 colleges and universities have taken CodePath.org courses in the past three years, and Facebook will help the organization quadruple the number of students taught each semester in 2019, Ellison noted.
Ellison's announcement came one day after a former Facebook employee criticized the tech company for failing black people.
Mark Luckie, former strategic partner manager for global influencers at Facebook, wrote in an internal note that was made public Tuesday that Facebook "has a black people problem."
Many black people felt they were marginalized and feared to speak up about their experience at the company, which has only 4 percent of black employees as of 2018, he said.
