Coding Latin American Innovation

The June 27 issue of The Economist has  a feature article on Latin American stagnation. The article contains few surprises: inefficient micro businesses, substandard infrastructure, business strangling bureaucracies, poor quality education, and on down the list. A list which has become canonical. The writer cites an inability to innovate as a critical failure for Latin Americans.
As an example of inefficiency the author calls out a family business centered around prewar knitting machines. I have enough familiarity with aging machinery to attest to the fact that keeping it running without the benefit of new parts is an exercise in innovation. When you have communities coping with aging capital, inadequate infrastructure, and monster bureaucracies, innovation becomes a survival skill of the first order. At a subsistence level brilliant innovation may be required just to keep from slipping back. Getting ahead may not be an option.
How to tap the same innovative energy that finds ways to repair old machinery, to get around town without effective infrastructure, or to find ways around strangling bureaucracies and turn it into a growth engine?
I have a friend who is a successful serial entrepreneur. During the dark days of the recent recession whenever I would write to him about a friend who was out of work or unable to progress in their career he would respond with the same three words, "Learn to code." Those words turn out to have been some solid advice as wages for coders of in demand languages are rising in the double digits per annum. No wage stagnation here.
At first glance teaching Latin Americans to code as a solution might seem naive. A few years ago it probably was. But the world is changing at the speed of bits and bytes. Type "learn to code (language of your choosing) for free" into your browser. In English the barrier to learning to code is mostly a willingness to put out the effort and access to a computer. Spanish language training could be built out if it doesn't exist already.
Of course not everyone in Latin America can learn to code, nor should they. But they don't need to. My wealth begets my spending begets someone else's wealth. Let some of the innovators learn to code and other innovators will find ways to build the business that use their code or serve the growing middle class.