Dufuna Digital Skills Programme

People of African origin are not adequately represented in digital jobs globally. Dufuna aims to solve this problem by identifying ambitious Africans, training them and helping them to find opportunities to acquire hands-on experience. If scaled globally, we can reach not only Africans in Africa but also Africans and other populations who are under represented in digital jobs.

About 10 million young Africans join the job market every year. In Nigeria alone, about 9.7M people were unproductive according to Q3 2018 data. It is estimated by the World Bank that 15 million jobs are need every year to address Africa's youth unemployment problem. 

At Dufuna, we believe that one way to solve this problem is to equip Africans with digital skills which can enable them to leverage their cultural and language  connections with Europe to benefit from the $150 billion spent outsourcing work in the region.

One of the reasons we have a shortage is the gap between what the educational system teaches and what employers need. For example, while at Google I learnt that one of the reasons Africans didn't perform well at  job interviews can be explained by this gap.

With an increase in the number of people with digital skills, young people in Africa may not even need to leave the continent to access these jobs because:

• They will have access to compete for jobs remotely.
• Companies can locate their offices on the content. E.g In 2019 Microsoft pledged to invest over $100M in some African countries. 

Dufuna has developed a  practical project-based curriculum which was inspired by  successful self-taught software engineers. We have taught this curriculum to two cohorts. 

• Cohort 1 comprised women only. 70% of the graduates secured internships within three months of graduation.
• Cohort 2 was a mixed group. They graduated during the global pandemic yet about 25% of the class secured jobs or internships within 1 month of completing the course.

The coding course is now being launched outside of Nigeria starting with Zambia in July 2020. The course content has been migrated to Android and iOS Apps to ensure that anyone with a smartphone and with access to a computer and the internet can benefit anywhere they are.

We are also creating other courses in Product Management, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Software Quality Assurance, Devops, Animation etc

Dufuna targets Africans who are interested in acquiring digital skills. We spent time to understand the processes and methods responsible for many success African Software Engineers in our network. We codified these processes and tested it out on two cohorts successfully. We included technology to help us scale across the continent and also to enable us to deliver the content as affordably as possible. Our tuition is currently about $1/day. We continue to involve these engineers to develop and review the content and to give us feedback on the processes and the technologies we employ.

Our solution equips our target groups with skills that are in demand globally. This gives them access to local jobs and also compete for remote jobs on sites like Upwork.

Our solution equips our target groups with the skills required to use technological tools to create solutions to problems in their environment which helps them to start businesses like Teachers Toolz.