Techie Rattus

We are providing the "Next Einstein" in Africa with the foundational technical skills and career guidance s/he needs to thrive and innovate in today’s competitive global economy. 

Many students in Sub-Saharan Africa lack these skills because the current education system puts less focus on supporting their .

How we do it:

• We mentor and skill passionate students in emerging technologies like Data Science, AI and Software Engineering throughout their studies. 
• We prioritize on female students and those from unprivileged backgrounds because they are most vulnerable.

What we hope to achieve:

1. Nurture a strong culture of research and innovation among students that will inspire lifelong learning and scholarship.
2. Timely prepare students for opportunities in the 4th Industrial Revolution by building an experience portfolio alongside their studies.
3. Empower students to become job creators by supporting innovative teams to launch startups.

Problem

We address the lack of basic, technical, and transferable skills among graduates in Africa blamed for the high unemployment rates. 

This skills shortage is attributed to an African education system that does not supports innovation in research, and provide the "Next Einstein" with the training and support he or she needs – in Africa

Statistics

• 1/3 of working-age population in developing countries lack the basic skills for quality jobs. 
• This population in Africa will grow by 450 million between 2015-2035
• Only 100 million of them will find stable employment opportunities by 2035. 

Why an opportunity exists

• The rapidly changing global economy driven by the 4th Industrial Revolution exacerbated the problem, requiring workers to be innovative, flexible, and adaptive.  

• Africa particularly faces unprecedented technological disruption and the demand for technical skills and soft skills that computers cannot master is very high.

• Kenya, ranked among top 4 technology ecosystems in Africa with almost 50 tech hubs, faces a significant digital divide and widespread gaps in basic and advanced digital skills. 

The World Economic Forum highlighted the importance of all sectors investing in building skills, not just for today, but to establish a sustainable pipeline of talent to meet future skills needs.

Our goal

To nurture Africa's young scientific talent in colleges to make the continent the pinnacle of innovation. 

How we achieve this goal

• We collaborate with industry, academia and resourceful platforms to mentor and equip students with skills in emerging technologies. 

• We work with industry partners to expose students to real-world problems right from commencement of their studies for early experience. 

• Through industry-led workshops, students work on industry-level problems in a workplace environment which exposes them to workplace ethic and gain skills critical in the 4th Industrial Revolution such as flexibility, adaptability, and remote teamwork. 

• We extend small grants to promising student projects and help innovative teams kick-start startups. 

• We collaborate with colleges align our programme with coursework and to set up well equipped student co-learning labs. These labs are open spaces to encourage co-learning.

• We collaborate with other institutions e.g. from Silicon Valley for fellowships, summer schools and to possibly find local applications of their student innovations, leading to startups.

• We will pilot a 1-2-week free residence program for tourists willing to share their experience with students and faculty.

Need for early experience portfolio?

• Today's entry level jobs require experience dismissing the idea of gaining experience at the workplace. 

Target population

• We target students from colleges, technical institutes, and vocational training centers. 

• We mainly focus on female students and students from unprivileged backgrounds. We collaborate with Financial Aid Departments to identify unprivileged students. 

How the solution impacts lives

We train, mentor, and engage students in solving real-world problems. This  makes them employable by building their experience portfolio and  enabling them to innovate.

Understanding target population needs 

We interviewed Financial Aid staff who revealed the difficulty of beneficiaries repaying their loans or lifting their societies out of poverty. They attribute this challenge to difficulty in securing good jobs. According to them, the graduates lacked competitive skills. They welcomed our collaboration to address the issue. 

We also spoke with several graduates who expressed career-path dilemma and many confirmed falling short of the technical skills demanded by employers.  

The current trainees cite course workload as a challenge. They welcomed  the idea of recitation sessions to review semester course concepts to avoid straining.

Undergraduate experiences

During undergraduate, many of us missed training opportunities due to cost. and were not guided on what skills to focus on. Additionally, most of our colleges take long to introduce courses on emerging tech which disadvantages students.

We are addressing the high unemployment rates among graduates in Africa attributed to a lack of basic, technical, and transferable skills. Our target group - female and unprivileged students, are particularly vulnerable.

This skills shortage prevents 50% of graduates in Africa from securing good jobs and taking advantage of opportunities presented by 4IR. We collaborate with industry, academia and resourceful platforms to mentor and equip students with these in-demand skills. We expose them to real-world problems early enough and help them build an experience portfolio and avail resources they need to access existing and create new opportunities.

Ours is an innovative model to address the lack of basic, technical, transferable skills, and experience portfolio among graduates.  

Below is a list of our potential competitors and how our model differentiates from theirs: 

• Innovation labs and hubs: whereas these centers give students a chance to participate in various learning opportunities, the cost attached is often prohibitive to underprivileged students. Besides, students are not their primary targets. We did not find any that mentors students throughout their programs while helping them build an experience portfolio in emerging technologies. Costs identified are above $100 per week. 

• Coding schools, AI training startups and bootcamps: A 12-month blended Data Science training at one of the AI training schools costs $2,900 and a 1-month programming prep course in another costs $400 and $1400 for a 3-months core course. A coding bootcamp in one lab costs $100 per week. Besides high costs, none of these centers has a continuous technical mentorship and career guidance programme for students. 

• Online learning platforms: these are the only hope for most underprivileged students. They are flexible and most affordable or free. However, they too do not provide continuous career mentorship and have no idea of the needs of their clients. They also lack the benefits of face-to-face learning and majority have a quality question mark. Given their flexibility and affordability, they complement our efforts.   

Our training is aligned with coursework and recitation sessions help students perform well and not strain. 

Our solution is a process model that will leverage on different application platforms including in-house and 3rd-party.

Online learning platforms

3rd-party platforms like DataCamp, Coursera, Udemy, AlgoExpert, HackerRank, MIT Open Courseware, and Zindi Africa will complement our efforts. These platforms are comprehensive, affordable and widely used. They cut down on platform and content development costs. 

In-house platforms (developed, under development and planned)    

• MyBrace, an online part-time job placement system for financially needy students is in advanced development stages. It will enable internal and external persons to extend short-term, non-intensive, paid work-study tasks for underprivileged students to work on. These tasks help them build an experience portfolio besides being a source of upkeep income. A future version will use AI to match student profiles with job opportunities.

• Career mentoring system is proposed for development and will allow experts to sign up to be domain mentors. It will also enable monitoring of the mentorship through student and mentor feedback.  

• Online innovations expo system is proposed for development and will provide a platform for students to showcase interesting projects they are working on. It will allow industry to request involvement as consultants, sponsors, or partners. 

Our solution uses web application technologies and include applications we have developed ourselves as a team as well as third party learning, assessment and competition platforms. For example, we are currently using DataCamp platform to train our students on Data Science and related technologies. 

Some platforms leveraged on

Data Science and Machine Learning

• DataCamp has been loved by our students due to platform simplicity and content organization. Our students range from beginner to intermediate on this topic and the platform enables them to group into different skill levels for collaboration. 

• Zindi Africa and Kaggle platforms are great platforms for our students to test their skills by working on real-world Data Science and Machine Learning problems to build an experience portfolio in the field. 

The Software Engineering 

• Our students use platforms like MIT Open Courseware, HackerRank, freeCodeCamp, eDx, Coursera, Udemy among others to explore different technologies under our guidance.

In-house platforms

• Our part-time job placement platform that will provide paid work-study opportunities for financially need students is at advanced development stages and a demo can be accessed here.

Current numbers

Currently, we are working with 150 students from Strathmore and Riara Universities. We are training and mentoring the students online and hoped to get funding to set up our first student co-learning space at Strathmore University post Corona virus. 

In the next 1 year, assuming availability of resources, we hope to:

• Enroll over 10,000 students to our program.

• Expand across Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda

•  Collaborate with 10+ universities to set up well equipped student co-learning spaces. This is our learning model to cut on training costs. 

In the next 5 years, we hope to:

• Have mentored and skilled about 1,000,000 students
• Have an active student base of about 100,000 students every year
• Have presence across 20+ countries in Africa. 
• Support over 100 student teams with interesting ideas to launch startups.

In the next year, our team will:

• Draft working MoUs with select universities in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. The MoUs will address among other items terms of collaboration, co-funding of student co-learning centers and utilization of existing resources like innovation and incubation centers and complementing the work of technical course instructors.

• Set up at least 5+ student co-learning spaces in select Universities in the countries.  

• Recruit about 10,000 students to our program. We will collaborate with course instructors to highlight our program and its benefits so as to inspire more students to participate.

• Partner with more organizations to support our cause through funding, resources, internships, fellowships etc.

• Complete the development of the earlier mentioned in-house applications.

In the next 5 years, our team will

• Expand to 10+ countries across Africa. We will utilize the diversity of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) - Africa masters alumni currently spread across 17+ African countries and counting. 

• Reach out to more technical and vocational institutions that are out of major cities and suffer unemployment the most due to quality of their programs - mostly diplomas, and lack of access to innovation labs which are mostly concentrated in major cities. 

• Partner with more organizations for funding, resources, internships, fellowships etc.

Financial challenges

• Funding problem - the success of this project will largely depend on funding. We officially kick-started the program this February as volunteer trainers and have been doing it out of passion and goodwill. We have received no funding yet. Funding will help us set up well-equipped co-learning labs for students and hire personnel to support the program activities and design our various software applications. 

• Sustainability problem - this is inherently a not-for-profit program. This implies a sustainability problem because it means depending on donors. Given the anticipated expansion and uptake of this program, we need some way of achieving sustainability.

Market barriers

• The most anticipated challenge is college acceptance of recitation sessions for students on technical course concepts as they are not common in Africa. It needs a lot of trust from course instructors and integrity from our teams to ensure there is no violation of academic integrity of takeaway assignments and projects.

• It is also possible that some instructors put less effort explaining concepts to their students hoping they will seek support from our team. 

• Our program might unintentionally put pressure on instructors in the event students on our programme challenge them in coursework.

• We plan to use a good deal of our first year to pilot the project and collect in-depth feedback from our partner institutions to see how we can best collaborate in a way that complements their technical course instruction. 

• We are exploring possibility of offering recitation sessions as a paid service on specific course programs to individuals or bill faculties for hours spent helping other students.  

• We are exploring training on deferred payment arrangement such that beneficiaries pay back the cost of training on securing opportunities exceeding a certain income per month; and spread over several years. 

• Students not from unprivileged backgrounds will be charged a program fee per year.

• We intend to work on a cost sharing and co-running arrangement with our partner institutions. For example, partner institutions can provide space for free. Equally, we can help set up the model spaces and once it gains traction after a year, hand it over to the institution with full absorption of our staff working on it.

We have 5 volunteer trainers.

We currently have a team of 5 volunteer trainers all holders of masters degree from Carnegie Mellon University - Africa campus, with specializations in Data Science, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, IoT, Embedded Systems and IT Entrepreneurship. Our teams have varied years of experience in the different areas of specialization.

Techie Rattus currently has 2 partners:

• Strathmore University is our first pilot University of this initiative.
• DataCamp has given us FREE access to their entire course database and a collaboration dashboard.

Initially, we will seek funding from donations and grants in support of our cause. 

Once we have undertaken in-depth piloting, we intend to take an embedded model in which some of our services will be premium. These services include:

• Consultancy services in design of technical courses aligned with the market drawing from evaluation of our success factors and engagement with industry. We will have an advantage of extensive industry feedback.

• To exist as a more independent 'department' in institutions supporting student research and innovation in technical areas in collaboration with faculty. In this case, the universities fund our activities involving our students, especially students on financial loans.

Initial funding - we are in need of initial funding to set up our model student co-learning spaces in 2 colleges in Kenya. The costs incurred will be in equipping the spaces with emerging tech tools and resources.

We will use this pilot spaces to showcase the benefits of our model and partner with more institutions to set up the same model at their own costs.

• Partnerships to set up and equip student co-learning spaces with emerging tech resources.
• Partnerships with institutions seeking applications of their student innovations in Africa.
• Partnerships to involve our students in emerging technology projects to put into practice their acquired skill set.
• Partnerships with experts to mentor students passionate in their areas of expertise.
• Partnerships to sponsor activities and workshops. 
• Partnerships on student exchange programs and fellowships.

• Institutions of learning like MIT - to seek local applications of their student innovations and co-launch startups and extend fellowships to our talented students in tech.
• Cloud service providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google - to give our students affordable cloud services such GPUs for deep learning.
• MIT faculty & Solve members - to mentor our students in emerging technologies. This includes guest speeches.
• Organizations - to offer the students we train internship opportunities in emerging tech and donate tech resources.
• In-kind funding organization like Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - to support our cause with funding. 
• Experts in business and revenue models to help us crack a sustainability model.

Our initiative seeks bridge the technical skills gap in Africa blamed for high graduate unemployment rates. We do this by skilling and mentoring students in emerging technologies from the time they enroll in college, with special focus on female students and those from unprivileged backgrounds who are the most vulnerable. 

Equipping the students with skills and involving them in applied projects throughout their studies helps them build an experience portfolio. This enables them to exploit more rewarding opportunities presented by the 4th industrial revolution. It gives them the tools to innovate and initiate their own ventures.

The GM Prize on Good Jobs and Inclusive Entrepreneurship will help us set up student co-learning centers on emerging technologies in more out-of-city technical and vocational institutions for this purpose and to expand to Rwanda and Uganda.