Blossom Academy

Providing university graduates in Ghana with the technical and soft skills required for meaningful careers in Data Science.

Consumer spending will reach $2.5 trillion in Africa by 2025, according to McKinsey & Company. The more data companies have on consumers, the better they will be able to target them with products that meet their wants and needs. Today, African-based multinationals and high growth startups are generating large amounts of data about their customers and their buying behavior. However, they cannot find nearly enough data scientists to analyze this data for strategic decision making, so they look outside Africa, where the salaries are much higher.

In Ghana, 250,000 college grads enter the job market each year, but only 2%, or 5,000, find private-sector jobs — a pattern that is similar throughout Africa. This is commonly attributed to the limited focus on student's development of practical skills on the university level, which means many graduate ill-prepared to meet the demands of the labor market.

Upon discovering these challenges, we set out on a movement to create the next generation of African data scientists. Initially, we work with leading companies to design a tailored curriculum that addresses their deficiencies. In return, we give them access to our top graduates as data science analysts. We then work with leading educational institutions to repurpose their world-class content for our program. During training, students work on real-world technical problems and refine their soft skills-- which positions them to excel in their respective careers upon placement.

Our direct competitors include training facilities such as Moringa School, Samasource, and Andela. Our indirect competitors include platforms such as Coursera and EdX, should certifications alone be acceptable for employment.

Our key competitive advantages are:
- Our custom-tailored curriculum, where we design our curriculum based on the deficiencies of top companies;
- The quality of our talent pool: We spend several weeks recruiting top talent, which positions us to confidently invest in them and connect them to career mentors at no cost.
- Our focus on serving businesses operating in Africa, as opposed to outsourcing our graduates talents to jobs overseas.

A critical component of our training is for fellows to attain real-world experience by working on freelancing projects. At this point in training, students put their acquired technical skills to use and earn while studying. Additionally, most of our data science professionals in our mentoring program are based in the United States. Using tech platforms such as Whatsapp and Slack, communication is better facilitated between our fellows and mentors.

We focus on serving businesses operating in Africa. Having our students work with these companies - while based in Ghana - is made possible through the application of technology.

1. To have our current students successfully complete our pilot training program in the allotted 6-month training period.

2. To specialize in solving the data related challenges of our target sectors: Healthcare, Fintech, and E-Commerce. Per our research, these sectors collect much data and there is a need to analyze it to better personalize their products and services.

3. To continuously improve and innovate our curriculum through partnerships. One of our curriculum advisors, Tian Zheng, is a professor at Columbia University and we are currently working closely with her to secure a partnership with Columbia's Data Science Institute.

Our vision is to create Africa's most diverse and dynamic community of highly skilled and creative technology pioneers who are able to affect change and promote progress. To fulfill this vision and to scale our impact, we plan to launch an educational technology platform catered to localized ICT skills content in the next three to five years.

We believe positioning African youth to acquire applicable ICT skills, such as data science, will transform the economic growth of many African countries and position the continent to be a pioneer in multiple facets of the next industrial revolution.

Students in many universities throughout Ghana are not learning technical skills and real-world experience needed to meet the demands of the labor market.

Ghanaians are thus unable to take part in their endeavors because of their limited knowledge and skill sets in comparison to influx of foreigners who have been assuming Ghana's white-collar jobs.

The average Ghanaian lives on 500-700GH Cedis/month, provided they secure employment. By connecting university graduates to the digital economy, we project that fellows will experience at least a 350% increase in their salaries and multinational corporations and high growth startups will cut recruiting costs.

At Blossom Academy, our inaugural selection process attracted over 950 candidates; we then selected the top 0.7% for our pilot fellowship program after performance assessment on IBM Big Data University, in-person case studies, and interviews. As a result of our collaboration with DataCamp and EdX, we are able to assess how well our students are studying the content delivered by our professors. Additionally, from regular analysis of data-sets uploaded to Github and Tableau Public, we are able to determine our fellows' level of understanding of Data Science and build an employment profile.

The focus on data science was inspired by founder Jeph Acheampong's experience partnering with data analysts at Experian to help multinational corporations maintain a competitive advantage and boost revenue. Witnessing the role data plays in the digital economy, Jeph co-founded Blossom Academy alongside Ghanaian professionals with collective work experience that spans Lenovo, PwC, Jade Global, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Our training process is conducted in 4 steps:
-Training Program: Our in-person talent accelerator;
-Real-world experience: working with data science professionals on freelancing opportunities;
-Career Development: intensive career training on financial literacy and business etiquette skills;
-Career Placement: full-time placemebt as Data Science professionals withpartner companies across Africa.

As we grow our brand, we plan to launch a separate consulting entity where promising graduates work with our company as consultants. This helps them learn about different industries and sharpen their skill sets, while addressing the needs of our clients. On the client end, we've found from research that companies see a 20% savings compared to the costs they pay for recruiting, training, and mis-hiring that come with direct employment.

With support from Solve, we will hire experienced curriculum developers to help redesign our curriculum. We also plan to allocate capital to web optimization, social media campaigns, and public relation strategies in order to be more marketable. Powered by the MIT brand, we may be positioned to partner with leading universities across Africa and reach more talented youth.

Regarding investments in technology, we plan to invest in a cloud platform such as Amazon Web Series to host large datasets and in the future, build a localized Edtech platform catered to African youth looking to learn new ICT skills.

Lack of career placement - We work with top multinational corporations and assess their deficiencies.

National Service Barrier - We train students who have already completed their year-long National Service Requirement service.

Internet Penetration Gap - We employ local instructors to teach our content in person.

Automation of jobs - Almost 50% of all work activities in Africa will be susceptible to automation. Our long-term strategy includes training graduates for jobs to be created by automation (AI, machine learning, and making sense of big data).