Moringa School

Audrey Cheng was selected as one of the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs,World Economic Forum’s Top Female Innovators in Africa,and honored by Marie Claire on the “The Youngest Execs in the Country” list.Audrey has been a featured speaker at various conferences including the World Bank’s Global Youth Summit,OECD’s Pathways to Youth Employment Conference,and Tech Inclusion in Silicon Valley, among others. Audrey previously worked at Savannah Fund, a venture capital firm investing in early-stage tech companies across Africa.

Each year, 5M African university graduates are unemployed due to a dearth of relevant workplace skills. In Kenya, only 1% of computer science majors secure positions in their field of study. The issue is compounded by universities and other educational training programs that deliver outdated, theoretical content that does not match the needs of companies. 

Moringa School fills this void by offering a comprehensive, technology-focused curriculum designed to equip post-secondary students with the necessary technical and workplace skills to pursue and secure meaningful employment throughout Africa. With locations in Kenya and Rwanda, Moringa has placed more than 85%+ of its graduates into leading companies.

Through experienced teachers, a blended learning model, as well as a market and outcomes-driven curriculum, Moringa School’s mission is to transform higher education throughout Africa and enable its graduates to be globally competitive with their peers.

According to the International Labour Organisation, half of the 10 million African university students who graduate each year are unemployed, mainly due to a dearth of relevant workplace skills. And by 2050, 1 in 4 people on Earth will be African. Even if more jobs are created, there won't be enough skilled workers to take them and if we accept the status quo, Africa will host the largest unemployed population in the world. In 2019, only 13% of secondary school graduates in Kenya received a spot in university, and on average, it takes 5 years for a university graduate to find a full-time formal job in Kenya. Specific to the tech industry that Moringa School currently focuses on,only 1% of computer science majors can secure positions in their field of study. The reason for these poor outcomes is that existing universities and other educational training programs 1) deliver outdated, theoretical content that doesn't match the skills needs of companies 2) have low-quality teachers and 3) have lecture-based teaching proven to be ineffective in skills development. This results in two unwanted consequences: unemployment among graduates and companies not finding the right talent, in turn, outsourcing their technology work outside of Africa.

With campuses in Kenya and Rwanda, Moringa School teaches software development and data science to people aged 18-35 years. 

With a blended learning model (content online with in-person learning) and advanced Technical Mentors - the classroom facilitators - answering students’ questions, the school has been able to simulate a real working environment which ensures an easy transition into the workforce for the graduates of this program. In the classroom, Moringa uses a learning management system that tracks the progress of students and alerts Technical Mentors to which students need more attention. The School has adopted a paired and project-based approach to learning which ensures practicality and provides support from other students. The classroom culture is centered around autonomy, ownership, reliability and transparency through values of proactive participation and self awareness.  

Moringa School is known for its education-to-employment model where graduates are linked with leading companies throughout Africa and the world for employment opportunities.

Moringa School benefits to 18-35 year old secondary school leavers, university students or graduates, based in Nairobi (Kenya) and Kigali (Rwanda), who seek employment in software development and data science. Female students count for +/-40% in Kenya and 100% in Rwanda. We also aim to ensure accessibility to our courses for low-income and socially disadvantaged students (20% of our cohorts), through a special program called ‘Access’ (with the support or our partner: Mastercard Foundation) which provides them with a scholarship and necessary perks to be able to study. To date, Moringa has placed 85%+ of its graduates into full-time employment.

Internal processes are in place to make sure that we constantly listen to our students voice. The learning team works closely with technical mentors who supervise the students everyday, we also conduct regular surveys and engage the all-staff in students interviews during monthly assemblies. In addition, Moringa School hires its top students from every class into a Technical Mentor Fellowship program to train future Moringa students. Some current TMs were part of Moringa’s Access program for low income students. We also engage with employers to make sure we stay updated on their expectations and needs in terms of curriculum. 

Moringa School, as MIT Solve, observed that the future of work is heading towards an important number of jobs that require tech skills. In 2014, Moringa’s founder,Audrey Cheng, recognised that there were no tech skills institutions or the existing programs were not good enough to allow African economies to provide the well-equipped workforce they need to keep developing. We also know that tech jobs are decent and can constitute a promising career for youth, not only as employees but also as entrepreneurs. Moringa & MIT are aligned on the power of tech to tackle the good jobs & entrepreneurship challenge. 

In 2014, Audrey Cheng recognized that African companies were struggling to grow because of the lack of relevant skills and talent. There was a significant gap between the number of jobs available in the technology sector and the number of people with relevant skills needed. Moringa was created to bridge the gap between the needs of employers and young people by equipping young people with market-relevant skills through a classroom simulating a real working environment

Growing up in a low-income household, Audrey experienced a lack of access to certain experiences and still felt like the luckiest child in the world. Throughout her youth, she had access to incredible education that pushed her to think critically and creatively, and built up critical mindsets and beliefs that increased her confidence. Her education unlocked a desire in her to change the world, and Audrey sought out work that got her closer to identifying where her passion lies. From teaching English in an impoverished area in Taiwan to tutoring kids in Chicago neighborhoods to teaching at an initiative training high-potential youth, she learned her heart is in actualizing potential. 

When Audrey moved to Kenya in 2014 to work for Savannah Fund, which invests in African tech companies, she believed building local capacity in companies would yield the most effective way of developing economies and improving livelihoods (over traditional foundation and nonprofit models). She found the main pain point of tech companies was the lack of quality talent, and realized that solving this problem through actualizing the potential of young people through creating world-class education would improve the whole ecosystem as a whole.

Since 2010, Audrey has been working for a number of startups and growth companies in a variety of roles (growth, marketing, operations, etc). She has also worked on the investment/fund side for Savannah Fund in Kenya and True Ventures in the US, so she has a clear understanding of what investors and partners are looking for and how to attract capital to grow Moringa School. 

With over 6.5 years of experience running Moringa School, she leverages her experience to build strong teams and to keep alive the reason for being, she leverages her network to engage internal and external stakeholders and she uses her years of experience to create the direction of the company. Most importantly, she leverages off of a strong desire to continue learning everyday to keep pushing herself to grow with the company.

Audrey has been providing for herself financially since the age of 13, after her father lost his job and left the family, his being the only salary in their household. She worked to cover school and living expenses from middle school through her college years. She learned to balance focus and success in both the workplace and in school, doing everything from filing her taxes to organizing her move to university without anyone’s support.

This same mindset has applied to Moringa School, where the team has experienced numerous adversities from the fear of running out of cash to facing external challenges from partners to internal challenges with the team. In one instance in 2016 when Moringa had a small team of 15, one of Audrey’s colleagues was shot and killed on his way home. That shook her at ther core and the all team experienced a deep sense of loss. As they grieved, they spent due time remembering his life, honoring it by supporting his family and ensuring our team was supported through the mourning process. Instead of rushing through a hard experience, Audrey decided to slow down so that she could give ample time for the team to mourn.

As a Northwestern University student in 2011, Audrey saw a gap in our course offerings on entrepreneurship, despite the high interest. With that need in mind, she formed a team with the vision of creating an organization that could be a catalyst to support students passionate about exploring entrepreneurship. Her team created Project Pitch - an entrepreneur development program where students built and pitched startups each semester - which eventually led to the creation of EPIC, a large entrepreneurship umbrella that included various programming campus-wide. Audrey organized the team to follow the principles of holacracy to give more autonomy and a flexible organizational structure to support intrapreneurship as they grew. During her time, the organization grew to have 5 teams with over 100 members committed to the success of the organization and has far outlived her time at Northwestern.

Today with Moringa School, Audrey leads a team of 120+ people and engages regularly with Moringa’s stakeholders in government and private sector to ensure she continues to listen to Moringa’s ecosystem and serve as leaders in the technology education space in Kenya and across Africa.

The blended learning model, which incorporates multiple teaching models–(eLearning and traditional face-to-face learning) is completely new to the Sub-Saharan markets (except in South Africa). 

A blended learning approach ensures that the learner is engaged and driving his or her individual learning experience. This approach also helps cater to the individual needs of the learner: self-pacing for slow or quick learners reduces stress, increases satisfaction and information retention. Other benefits: E-learning allows more effective interactions between the learners and their instructors through the use of emails, discussion boards and chat room. Students have the ability to track their progress. This approach allows us to equip our students with both the technical and soft skills required in the professional world, collaboration being one of the most essential and naturally teached through the blended learning model. 

In our mission to improve youth employment in Africa, one of our organization's promises is to also support the placement of our students into companies which is a service not provided by any other education institution in Africa. To do so, we have a team dedicated to identifying the needs of local companies in hiring junior software developers, and building relationships with those hiring partners to help our students in their quest for a meaningful job. 

The challenge of youth unemployment is three-fold: the quality of the supply, linking the supply to the demand side and cultivating more jobs and demand. Moringa School applies a different perspective to education and focuses on the quality of the supply and links the high-in-demand skills of graduates to job opportunities. Our theory of change starts with equipping young aspiring professionals with the practical skills they need to be market-ready, skills that unfortunately are not gained via traditional education.  While our programs are intensive when it comes to technical skills, we know employers need much more.  We equip our students to be curious, self-sufficient, accountable, and strategic through our soft skills modules and simulating a real-world environment during our training. Our impact won’t stop there.  By ensuring we are graduating high-quality graduates with market-aligned skills, we will be providing the opportunity for employers to source employees locally, thus unlocking the growth potential of tech and tech-reliant industries in otherwise labor-dominated economies.  By transforming the level of talent available in emerging markets, we will contribute to the ultimate transformation of  economies and livelihoods of all.

Through our previous SPOC program in partnership with secondary schools to expose young adolescents and their parents to tech careers, through our partnership with Mastercard Foundation and other organizations to serve students from informal settings, and through our continued work with a large pool of employers, Moringa has already developed a strong ecosystem of opportunities in Kenya and Rwanda.

Moringa aims to build an even more cohesive talent ecosystem in each of these countries and beyond between public sector regulators and private sector job creators through facilitating a sector skills council that drives the definition and measurement of relevant technical and soft skills. This ensures that all skills taught at Moringa and other training institutions remain relevant to the needs of employers, and are regulated by the government for accountability. Through the public-private sector partnerships and Moringa’s courses in multiple countries, thousands of students across Africa will be impacted by receiving higher quality education that increases their employability.

Moringa School has demonstrated considerable impact since inception, doubling the number of students trained per year and training over 2,000 students in Kenya and globally to date. In 12 months we will be directly serving around 2,800 students. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both campuses shut down on March 15th and will remain closed until otherwise directed by the government. In order to serve our students and continue to fight youth unemployment, we have successfully shifted our in-person curriculum to a 100% remote experience, which lead us to accelerate our development through seeing new opportunities. Indeed, we know that despite the economic shrinkage, students are still interested in upskilling themselves and we are now also more accessible to students in other geographies because of this new online model. 

We expect to serve 25,000 students in five years and we aim to train 200,000+ knowledge workers through market-driven education in emerging markets by 2030.

Moringa is continuously working toward making our vision,a world in which anyone can create their future, a reality.We aim to achieve results in the following outcomes:

-  Quality income-earning opportunities/jobs. We measure this through our students placement rate which we want to maintain at a minimum of 85%+ in all campuses where we will operate.

-  Net earnings realized from income-earning activities, and/or household assets. Currently in Kenya our students who had a job before joining Moringa School see a 52% increase on average. 

-  Attainment of measurable, critical ‘deeper learning’ skills.Moringa technical mentors observe an 85 to 97% success rate in our student’s capacities to demonstrate these skills among different tests.

To scale, Moringa School will continue expanding its global partnerships. In the coming years, our primary focus will be scaling our curriculums through new campuses. Our Nairobi school will become a lab school where we do research and development, develop new courses, hone our teaching methods, and ensure our content remains relevant for employers. Besides opening campuses in major markets, we will build partnerships with universities, tech hubs and governments in Sub-Saharan Africa, who with support from our trained teachers, will reach thousands of students with the Moringa program.Over the next 5 years, we plan to develop the following competencies (through internal or external hiring): M&E Management; Government Relations Management; Expansion Expertise and Management; Leadership and operational support (technical mentors, classroom managers, admissions managers, HR/finance/legal representatives) at all new locations; Global networking; Partnership building; Fundraising; E-learning expertise

As we transitioned to fully remote learning in less than one week, we faced many challenges. Our product and learning teams worked around the clock to ensure the integrity of our program is preserved in a virtual setting. We’ve brought further support to our students whose families are financially strained by offering discounts, additional scholarships, psychological support and housing for our most vulnerable students. We will continue to invest in the improvements required to deliver a premium online product, but, as many companies globally are, we are experiencing financial strain as our main barrier to a bigger impact.

Typically, we need support on more scholarships to be able to involve more students, we also need technical assistance to roll-out flexible financing options, R&D assistance to continue improving existing products and building new products to ensure we can deliver on our brand promise and compete against other players that are also moving to online models, etc.

The impact of COVID on Moringa School has actually been highly beneficial as we discovered that our school is still very attractive to students even if fully online. We also managed to enroll students from countries outside of our operating countries and we are working on developing our offer to address more needs like those of part-time students/young professional students. We're working on integrating those new and very encouraging findings into our pitch for series A round, and many investors have already manifested interest in Moringa School. We're also actively developing our offer to students and for corporate trainings as our first mandates last year with big telco companies in Kenya confirmed that there's a need for tech upskilling and that Moringa School is very well positioned to respond to it. 

Another initiative to overcome these barriers is to create more opportunities for partnerships and grants: by developing an internal capacity to look for opportunities with funders and other partners all around the world whose strategy is aligned with ours, we're increasing our chances to receive the financial support we need to scale in other countries. 

The Mastercard Foundation-Moringa Partnerships: Young Africa Works

With 4.5 years of proven impact in helping youth secure employment in the technology sector, Moringa is now at a critical juncture to rapidly grow and train 200,000 more knowledge workers by 2030. To accomplish these ambitious goals Moringa needs to expand further to an underserved low-income market which is aligned with Mastercard Foundation’s aim for low-income young people across Africa to secure dignified and fulfilling employment. In addition, Moringa seeks support to ensure quality and high-impact on its students, as well as to design its model for scale and answer critical questions to shape its scale-up strategy.

In short, the Moringa and Mastercard Foundation’s partnership allows Moringa School to:

1) Strengthen the scholarship program, providing a skills-to-employment education for more low-income students, serving a total of 1,561 low-income students over the next three years, 20% of total students.

2) Invest in research and program development, through technical assistance to Moringa School, to a have greater positive impact on low-income students, as well as be able to scale to more students, both low-income and self-sponsored, to reach almost 8,000 students over the next three years.

Moringa School has 3 main business lines: direct tuition (self-sponsored students), Access program (sponsored by Mastercard Foundation to support low-income students) and B2B (tech upskilling programs for corporate trainings). 

Moringa School equips young people with tech skills that are highly in demand in the countries where we operate and currently poorly served by existing educational institutions. With our blended learning model we bring a better approach to teach the tech skills, we also equip our students with the soft skills expected by employers and we allow youth to find decent and long-term employment. With a 85%+ placement rate maintained through the years, Moringa School has confirmed its model is needed for both students and employers in Africa. We welcome 20% of low-income students through our Access program to support reducing the inequalities in the development of the economy and we have plans to update the self-sponsored payment model to make Moringa School even more accessible to all. 

Our path to financial sustainability is top of mind for Moringa at this stage of growth. This includes equity capital to invest in growth, direct sales (B2B and B2C), and sustainable grant funding through several multi-year committed partnerships. We aim to diversify the product offerings as well as growing our curriculum with new full-time products each year. In 2019, we successfully launched a new course and created a successful curriculum for professionals who need upskilling/reskilling. We are preparing to raise our series A funding as we plan to open three more campuses and develop three additional courses by 2023:

- Kenya Campus will break even in 2021,company will break even in 2023, and new campus time to break even is estimated between six months to a year

- Overall revenue growth of at least 50% year on year

- Maintenance of 85%+ job placement for B2C indefinitely, though we will expand opportunities for graduates (entrepreneurship, consulting, freelance, remote, etc.)

- Gross margin will increase due to increased efficiencies and decreased space costs

We are investigating further avenues of financial inclusion to make our products more accessible to all and believe this will be a key lever in our ability to scale across the continent. The increasing amount invested in education, in the markets we target, as well as the growth of the tech ecosystem in Africa encourages us in our vision and mission as the need for talent continues to grow.

In our expansion plan, we need financial support or technical assistance with the following:

• Scholarship support

• Other student financing avenues (loans, ISAs, etc.)  

• Development of financial instruments aimed at supporting vulnerable populations 

• International expansion 

• Product development