Tribesquare

Africa's youth unemployment rate is on the increase. Unfortunately, African universities keep adding to the pool by graduating unemployable, and inexperienced people, leaving half of the 50 million students who graduate each year, unemployed!

With the rising demand for software engineers globally, Africa’s youth population can potentially solve the world’s talent issues, and that’s why Tribesquare exists.

Tribesquare is a web-based talent accelerator that develops young Africans, especially students, through access to self-paced, mentor-led software learning and remote work, so they are experienced enough and immediately employable after school. Our mission is simple - to transform the most motivated novices into experienced software engineers, recruiters never have to retrain.

Tribesquare's goal is to develop 1 million software engineers by 2030.

1 million skilled and engaged young Africans means 1 million people out of poverty, 1 million families living decent lives, and a decrease in youth unemployment by 0.7%.

140 million young Africans are unemployed, and the universities keep adding to this pool by churning out unemployable and inexperienced engineers. And although, there is a high demand for software engineers globally, the number of available competent software engineers is slim, making it harder for recruiters to find and fill open positions, leaving half of the 50 million students who graduate each year, unemployed!

The scale and consequences of this is summarized by the African Development Bank (AfDB.) According to the AfDB, "While 10 to 12 million youth enter the workforce each year, only 3.1 million jobs are created, leaving vast numbers of youth unemployed. The consequences of youth unemployment in Africa are pervasive and severe: unemployment translates to poorer living conditions, fuels migration out of Africa, and contributes to conflict on the continent itself...."

Tribesquare is looking to transform the lives of young Africans and recent graduates thinking about jobs, either unemployed or underemployed, as well as HR Managers looking to on-board quality African engineers affordably.

Tribesquare regularly engages with talents through meetups and questionnaires, and for talents in Africa, we've discovered that finance is the biggest challenge to access, hence our affordable pricing model, and provision of paid internships even during their learning phase.

Also, a ton of graduates have told me, "Kelechi, if I had known, I would have learned to code back in school;" Now, learning is difficult. Everyone is pressured into looking for a source of livelihood, and there's barely decent work outside the software industry in the country. With our flexible model more students across Africa can learn to code while in school.

From our engagement with recruiters so far, they waste time and money vetting, retraining and filling talents. Our model makes it easier to fill talents via data-driven recruitment. Machine learning would be used to understand each engineer's work culture - when they like to work, when they perform most, what they may like, their interactions, habits, etc, in order to properly help recruiters make recruitment decisions.

Tribesquare is solving the digital workforce and skills-gap by providing students access to flexible software training, mentoship and remote work, while in school, and recruitment immediately after school, through an intuitive virtual learning, work, and recruitment web platform. The platform provides a learning and project management system that allows users to access self-paced content, and communicate with mentors in real time, through messaging or video chat. Mentors help remove blockers, provide code reviews, approve assignment/project submissions, and generally help the students succeed, at the pace of the student. 

After completing the coursework, students are automatically added to available project simulations, then real life work on successful completion of a set of simulations. As students build projects, with approval from project managers, they gain points and move from one rank to another, with the system tracking what was done, when it was complete, and every data necessary to provide proper work analysis, for the consumption of recruiters in the future. On reaching certain levels, students are automatically visible to recruiters who review work statistics provided from data gathered during internship, and can make offers directly to available graduates.

Our solution ensures that our graduates are more experienced and employable on their first recruitment, with a track record of verifiable work done even as students. And that recruiters are constantly hiring the right fit for their businesses.

With a growing number of talent accelerators like Andela, Youtube, and Moringa, Tribesquare stands out by providing a remote platform where learning is administered, work is managed, and recruitment is facilitated, and best still is we accept Zero-knowledge people, unlike most.

The platform combines learning and work with gamification, in order to make the process more competitive and fun; and ensure we're churning out "experienced" graduate engineers. Our self-paced, mentor-led, community support approach ensures that learning is flexible, and challenges with "learning alone" are non-existent.

Tribesquare focuses on learning in school; with the high demand for software engineers, we believe that waiting to learn after school is a “waste” of time.

Our data-driven recruitment approach ensures that recruiters can quickly understand their prospects, and easily hire only the right fit for their businesses, without spending too much time and money vetting talents, or retraining them.

Generally, Tribesquare’s model is cost-effective and scalable within Africa and beyond, and has a high capability of impacting the world across SDGs 1,4, and 8.

Last month a friend narrated his ordeal; his story was quite sad, but he ended by saying “Kelechi, I need help right now; I have been trying to fix my life and help my family, but it is not easy, and I can’t remain like this. If I had known, I would have learned to code back in school." - he was a computer engineering student, but failed to learn to code while in school.

Like many others, learning to code is now difficult. Everyone is pressured into looking for a source of livelihood, and there's barely decent work outside the software industry in Nigeria and Africa. In fact, having a job does not guarantee a decent living. According to the UN, 8 percent of employed workers and their families worldwide lived in extreme poverty in 2018.

On the other hand, with our pilots, we have transformed the lives of a handful of young Nigerians who now earn an average of $600 monthly. This is 100% above the poverty line.

Our model makes it easy to combine school work with coding, and still succeed, and in the end, earn a better life than most people of other professions.

We currently have 10 students in our pilot. This year we estimate to serve 960 students, and >= 20,000 students in 5 years.

Tribesquare's goal is to develop 1 million software engineers by 2030.

Developing and engaging 1 million young Africans means 1 million young Africans out of poverty, 1 million families living decent lives, a reduction in the youth unemployment rate by 0.7%, and generally setting up Africa for economic prosperity.

Meanwhile, our only goal this year is to officially launch and reach up to 1000 users. In the next 5 years, our goal is to directly impact 20,000 African youths, and indirectly impact 100,000 Africans, through the provision of skills, job opportunities, and innovation. We would achieve these by scaling our product across all African regions, from west to south Africa in the next 5 years.

With our ADA initiative, in partnership with gender sensitive organisations and governments, we will provide free training and work opportunities to 5,000 African girls by 2024, and ensure that gender gaps in the software engineering field in Africa are reduced.

Also, at Tribesquare we have a real opportunity to solve real community and social issues. We will partner with 100 non-profits and other civil organisations seeking for talents to solve problems with software technology, pro-bono or for stipends, to build solutions. That way, we get more real life work for engineers-in-training, while helping to solve real life problems with technology.

With these and more initiatives we will develop, we would impact Africa across the following SDGs:

1 - No poverty

4 - Quality Education

5 - Gender Equality

8 - Decent work and Economic Growth

1. Access to more quality content, and human resources to help deliver an awesome learning experience.

2. Operational funding to scale the current impact and also on-board more professionals to the team. We have a great team, but we need even more to achieve the growth we anticipate and at the scale our future customers need.

We have begun the process of speaking with a financial partner who will inject about $2,800 for operational purposes. We have also partnered with Slatecube to access awesome courses, as well as reached out to a couple of content developers to give us access to their content. So far we are making progress, and have in fact put together the human resources necessary to launch in March.

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I personally love and plan to expand to Germany. I have friends and partners who live and work there; hence it is a more viable option for me. Also Germany has a low youth population compared to Africa, and has demonstrated a high need for African talents, with AFRIKA KOMMT! actively recruiting Africans into top notch German companies.

Being in Germany would also give us access to the European market, her youth population, and more credibility and global recognition, than operating directly from Africa.

Finally the startup ecosystem is friendlier than in Africa currently, and offers better opportunity and support for growth.

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Currently, 1 Full-time, and 5 Part-time.

As a software engineering graduate, with training experience from teaching in schools and for Google, and having ran a few business and led certain groups in the past, I actively lead Tribesquare as CEO, and head of learning and Development, allowing me to drive strategy and monitor learning outcomes.

Adenekan Wonderful, the head of engineering, and lead instructor has 3+ experience in building products and leading teams at companies like Tech Advance, Fast, Tunga, 54gene, e.t.c.

All together, Tribesquare is driven by young, passionate and experienced software engineers from low to middle income backgrounds who know how software has changed our lives, and are willing to help more Africans access software skills and opportunities in order to help change lives as well.

We are partnering with Charisol and MyApps Labs in order to access real life work and project simulations for internship. Afrivelle provides us with extra engineers to meet certain product development demands at our current level of growth.

This year, as we launch, we are working on partnering with a couple of hubs on other to guarantee access to power and internet for users who may have bad supply of those.

We are also looking forward to partnering with The Odins Project, in order to implement their robust curriculum. We trust that coming on-board MIT's Solve will help facilitate this.

We operate a B2C2B model, across training, outsourcing and recruitment.

B2C:
Aspiring software engineers (students and fresh graduates thinking
about jobs) pay a monthly subscription of $10 - $55 to access live classes, mentorship and learning resources. After the learning phase, they're are upgraded to internships where they access both simulations and paid projects.

B2B:
Companies and businesses looking to outsource all or part of their projects pay a fee (>=1,000 USD) for projects outsourced to us.

Organisations looking to develop social / community projects at little or no cost for simulation by our Engineers-in-training can also outsource to us.

Recruiters looking for more permanent professional hires pay a yearly subscription of $250 - $1,000 to access the best talents, as well as a one-time recruitment fee of $1,000 for every successful hire.

Although our primary source of revenue is training, it's usually only enough to slightly sustain us, coupled with other bootstrapping efforts.

Tribesquare's long term financial growth is hinged on her ability to provide work from outsourcing streams, and transform her students into Engineers recruiters need. Thus we are constantly reinvesting in training, and developing strategies for boosting learning outcomes, as well as increasing partnerships for accessing work.

In order to quickly get us through to our long term financial goals, we are counting on raising initial investments or getting enough grants to sustain our current efforts and help us meet the demand of growth.

As much as we are regularly working on improving our processes, and talking with a few companies to understand what they may need in talents, we know there's still more to be done. We are looking forward to taking advantage of MIT's learning and development expertise and people in helping us figure out the best strategies and tools for achieving industry centered learning outcomes.

Tribesquare is looking forward to adding data science and machine learning to its learning path. MIT's massive knowledgebase in this area is invaluable in our contribution to the future of work in Africa and all around the world.

Also, we are counting on MIT's influence to get us some exposure and build credibility, in order to increase our network of potential outsourcing and recruitment partners, and customers.

Finally, with your mentorship and financial support, we can learn more about, and advance our model, as well as scale our impact all around the world.

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We'd like to partner with industry leaders, like The Odins Project, Google, Microsoft, in order to access a more robust learning and development curriculum and content.

Having non-governmental organisations or government agencies like the World bank, USAID, AfDB, etc, looking to develop millions of young Africans as partners, would help us scale our impact around Africa, while building our brand credibility.

Finally we're looking forward to working with businesses from around the world looking to outsource product development or hire engineering talents, more affordably.