As organizations committed to broadening diversity and inclusion in our community, we stand with #BlackLivesMatter and join those who demand justice for systemic oppression. Pervasive racism negatively impacts the participation of Black people in society. The current events in the USA echo what has happened and continues to happen to minoritised people across the world. We are aggregating resources and are taking deliberate actions to amplify the voices of Black, Indigenous and People of Color in the R community now and moving forward.

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Using the satRday Johannesburg 2020 conference as a springboard, Forwards set up a project to help build the R community in Southern Africa. With funding from the Why R? Foundation, the R Consortium and a crowd-funding campaign, Forwards collaborated with local R users to run a series of training and community events in South Africa, Eswatini and Botswana. All the events promoted AfricaR, the pan-African network of R users, to help raise awareness of this community among R users in Southern Africa.

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On September 8, 2019, Samantha Toet and Angela Li co-taught a 3-hour Forwards Package Development Workshop at a weekend R-Ladies Charlottesville Meetup. The workshop took place as a result of Angela being in town - she reached out to Sam and suggested the workshop, Sam thought it was a good idea, and they worked together to coordinate the logistics (all Sam!) and teaching. By using the Forwards curriculum and pre-made organizing templates - with a few tweaks of their own, of course - they were able to pull together the workshop in a month.

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Growth of the R ecosystem in Africa Over the past 2 years, we have seen R transform from just an academic and health care research language to one of the major languages in the budding data science community in Africa. For a long time, data scientists and related disciplines have relied on R and many other packages to analyse data, however, the broader developer community didn’t fully understand its power in the tech industry.

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Thanks to generous funding from the R Consortium, Forwards has offered a series of workshops around the world to support the development of coding skills and to increase the participation of women in the R community. In the last year and a half, more than 10 workshops have engaged more than 100 high school students and women in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the USA. Information about our series of workshops for women and girls can be found on the Edu section of the Forwards website.

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