When two missions meet: how Harbour.Space and Giga are closing the digital divide together

On March 6th, I walked into Ca l'Alier, the 19th-century textile factory in Poblenou that now houses the Giga Technology Centre, for the annual Giga Day event. I had been to the space before, but this time felt different. This time, two of our Work & Study students were on the other side of the room, not as newcomers learning the ropes, but as software engineers building technology that connects schools around the world to the internet. That moment, more than any metric or partnership agreement, captured what we are trying to do at Harbour.Space.

Giga is a joint initiative of UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), launched in 2019 with a goal that sounds almost impossible: map every school on the planet and connect them all to the internet by 2030. The scale of the challenge is staggering. Roughly half of the world's schools are still offline. An estimated 1.3 billion children lack internet access at home. In many countries, governments do not even have a complete record of where their schools are located.

The way Giga approaches this is methodical and deeply technical. First, they map schools using satellite imagery, AI, and open-source tools. Then they assess connectivity status in real time. From there, they model the infrastructure and cost to connect each school, and work with governments and telecom providers to make it happen. Their Technology Centre in Barcelona, where Giga Day took place, is home to over 30 engineers and data scientists doing exactly this work, and it has become one of the largest open-source research hubs for school connectivity in the world.

Victor Lopez is from Santiago de Cuba. He grew up in a country where bandwidth is not something you take for granted. Despite that, he became one of Cuba's strongest competitive programmers. He won gold at the Cuban Olympiads of Informatics in 2016, silver in 2014, and earned a bronze medal at the Iberoamerican Programming Contest, one of the most competitive algorithmic contests in the Spanish-speaking world. He represented Cuba four times at the ICPC Caribbean Finals, the regional stage of the world's most prestigious collegiate programming competition. For context, ICPC contestants are the kind of problem-solvers that companies like Google, Meta, and Jane Street actively recruit.

Victor completed his Computer Science degree at the University of Oriente with a GPA of 4.71 out of 5 and went on to build a career as a full-stack developer across companies in the US, Canada, and Cuba, working with everything from microservices architecture and Kubernetes to React and FastAPI. But getting access to the right opportunity, the kind that matches your talent to a global mission, is not always straightforward when you come from a place where the infrastructure itself limits what you can reach.

Brenda Kagendo is from Kenya. She earned her Bachelor's in Information Technology from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) and had already built a serious career before arriving in Barcelona, working as a software engineer at Echo Mobile, Real Biz Digital, the Kenya Revenue Authority, and ARC Ride. She knows what it means to live with unreliable internet. Throughout her education and career in Nairobi, connectivity was never a given. That experience shaped not just her technical focus but her understanding of what it means when infrastructure fails the people who depend on it.

Both Victor and Brenda joined Giga through Harbour.Space's Work & Study programme. They came in as part-time team members while pursuing their studies, contributing to the very technology that aims to solve the connectivity problem they had each experienced firsthand. Brenda is now completing her Master's in Applied Data and Computer Science at Harbour.Space while working at the Giga Technology Centre, developing data-driven solutions for global connectivity mapping. Victor brought his competitive programming background and full-stack expertise into the same mission. What started as a Work & Study placement became something more: they were retained by Giga because they were excellent at what they do, they had proven themselves on real projects, and they were deeply aligned with Giga's mission on a personal level.

This is a story about talent meeting opportunity and delivering results. These are engineers who build high-performance APIs, scalable data pipelines, and cloud-native applications for one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects the United Nations has ever undertaken.

For those unfamiliar with the programme, Work & Study is how Harbour.Space bridges the gap between education and employment. Partner companies sponsor talented individuals from around the world, covering their tuition and providing a living stipend while they study at our university in Barcelona and work part-time at the sponsoring company. The students are not interns in the traditional sense. They work on production-level projects from day one. They ship code, they design systems, they solve real problems.

What makes this model different from a conventional scholarship or internship is the alignment of incentives. The company gets access to rigorously selected, highly motivated talent. The student gets world-class education, professional experience, and a path to a career. And when it works the way it did with Giga, the student becomes the employee, not because of a pipeline on paper, but because of performance in practice.

We have written about the Work & Study programme before. If you want to understand the mechanics in more detail, you can read our earlier piece on how the programme works and what the admission process looks like. But what I want to emphasize here is not the process. It is the outcome.

I will be honest: walking out of Giga Day, I felt something I did not expect. Pride, yes, but also something more personal. Seeing Victor and Brenda in that room, presenting alongside UN officials and tech leaders, reminded me why I do this work. It is easy to get caught up in the mechanics of partnerships, the contracts, the KPIs, the placement numbers. But then you see two people whose lives were shaped by the very problem they are now solving, and it puts everything back into focus.

This story is not just for companies considering a Work & Study partnership, though I hope it reaches them too. It is for anyone who has ever felt that the right opportunity was just out of reach because of where they were born or what infrastructure was available to them. It is for the teachers and mentors who push talented young people to apply for things that seem impossible. It is for the people inside organisations like Giga who take a chance on someone from a non-traditional background and discover that the talent was always there, just waiting for the door to open.

At Harbour.Space, our purpose is to give talented people from anywhere in the world the chance to build the futures they deserve. We look for "raw diamonds," the gold medalists, the self-taught developers, the people who built things despite not having access to the best tools or the best connections. We bring them to Barcelona, we pair them with companies doing meaningful work, and we watch what happens.

Giga's purpose is to make sure that the next generation of Victors and Brendas will not have to overcome a connectivity barrier to reach their potential. They are building the infrastructure so that a student in rural Kenya or Cuba can access the same learning, the same information, the same opportunity as a student in Barcelona or San Francisco.

Standing at Giga Day, watching them present their work, it struck me that these two missions are not just compatible. They are the same mission seen from two directions. Harbour.Space gives opportunity to the people who are ready now. Giga is making sure that more people will be ready in the future.

If you are a company working on something that matters and you are looking for extraordinary talent, I would like to talk to you. The Work & Study model is not charity. It is a talent strategy. It gives you access to people who have been vetted through competitive selection, who bring diverse perspectives from dozens of countries, and who are motivated not just by a paycheck but by purpose. Giga did not have to keep Victor and Brenda. They chose to. That, more than anything, tells you the calibre of talent that comes through this programme.

And if you are not a company but this story touched you the way it touched me, share it. The more people know that these paths exist, the more Victors and Brendas will find their way to them.
If you want to learn more about partnering with Harbour.Space through Work & Study, reach out to us at partnerships@harbour.space. We would love to hear from you.

If you are interested in further growth, take a look at our website to learn what your future could look like at Harbour.Space. If you are a company interested in Work & Study partnerships, visit our scholarship page or get in touch with us directly.