In the summer of 2026, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed called upon his nation's youth to cross a threshold that five million of their peers had already crossed — free, certified digital education through the ECODES program. Born from a partnership with the United Arab Emirates and rooted in the belief that code is the new literacy, the initiative now reaches toward seven million participants, carrying with it an equity mandate and a generational wager: that a nation's economic destiny can be rewritten one enrollment at a time.