African Coding Network

I’m the first person to acknowledge the ambition of what the African Coding Network is trying to do. Sometimes I wonder if it's too, ambitious, you know- a moonshot sort of idea.  But my inherent optimism and attraction to the scale and complexity of such a wicked problem as African education keeps me hacking away.

The Elevate Prize seems to share my optimism: looking to support high-impact, ambitious, game-changing solutions to some of the biggest challenges of our time.  Acknowledging the limitations of my own, and our single NGO’s, ability to tackle such a challenge makes me appreciate the value of what the Elevate Prize seeks to give. 

 We’re always resource-constrained and a little prize money will go far. But I’ve also learned to appreciate how low resource environments push you to make progress in other innovative ways. I’m proud of our NGO- Umuzi- a testament to this, punching well above our weight in many cases.  

 The network and access of expertise the prize elevates us to is the real attraction. To tackle our very real local African challenges, with more strategic guidance, more partners and greater diversity in collaboration really excites me. 

The African Coding Network is an ambitious undertaking. So much so, that we were our biggest critics. It took a genuine mindset shift to think about our high quality, in-person South African based training programmes, as something that could be made accessible and scalable. For a long time, we didn’t believe scaling professional-level education could be done without compromising the experience and enablement of the learner. 

 Covid-19 gave us the nudge to re-imagine ourselves in a new light. Turns out, not only can we deliver our tech programmes fully remotely at the same quality we’ve become accustomed to, but we’ve got some incredible assets in both process and technology, and a wealth of experience in our decade-old, impact-driven organisation and team. 

 It begged the question, could we share this wealth of knowledge with others, who may be less prepared for the realities of Covid, and support even move African youth to access professional tech careers? 

 Covid no longer defines our narrative, but what remains is our belief that there is an urgent need to address the tech skills and inequality gap in Africa. Only now we’ve got the conviction that a solution the size of the problem can be created.

Youth account for 60% of Africa’s unemployed. The youth population is expected to double by 2050. Africa needs to meet the current and growing future needs of economic activity for African Youth.

One economic opportunity exists in Africa's rapidly growing technology sector, where the need for local tech skills is growing. Yet, traditional education is failing to keep pace with the growing tech skills needed. Existing opportunities exacerbate inequality, favouring males, financially excludes the poor and benefits those few with access to the internet. 

To address the tech skills AND inequality gaps, the African Coding Network aggregates and supports three key stakeholder networks- Youth, Coding Schools, Employers- and establish a shared-value marketplace between supply and demand. 

We support young marginalised African youth to select quality learning-to-earning pathways, train in in-demand digital skills and accelerate their careers in tech.  

This youth-centred talent pipeline approach focuses on the end-to-end support needed to get African youth economically active in tech careers, at scale. 

Potential to scale: Our collaborative, partner-driven approach with a decentralised and distributed network means we can reach more youth and create more opportunities. This systems driven view, leading to indirect impact is highly scalable. 

End-to-end youth support: The proposal is not a stand-alone training solution. We’ve learned that effort needs to be put into supporting youth through an end-to-end process- Selecting, Training and Accelerating- to ensure economic activity. 

Multi-stakeholder: With a focus on creating value for Youth, Coding Schools and Employers, each stakeholder is incentivised to work collaboratively to a functioning ecosystem or marketplace. 

 These interdependencies are outlined below: 

• Select: Generating awareness of tech careers with African youth - specifically marginalised youth and women. Identifying high-potential, underserved talent, and guiding them toward the right tech learning opportunities. 

• Train: Linking youth to African coding schools, and enabling schools to deliver high-quality training programmes through open-source ed-tech training software and curated curriculum. 

• Accelerate: Meeting scarce skills need of the market, by linking work-ready youth to economic activity, be it local, global or self-employment.  

Without the correct skills, Africa may not capture the value of the growing tech need.

The starting salary, and career growth, for tech professionals is significant. From our existing training programme in South Africa (700 alumni), web developers start on $6,500-16,200 p.a and grow on average to $20,300p.a within three years. 

We estimate 1.7mil of additional lifetime income and $650k of additional lifetime income tax revenue. 

1) Evidence generating pilot:  support learners through the end-to-end learning to learning journey in multiple African countries:

• Test, Select, Train and Accelerate across 6 African countries, east, west and southern African, focused on marginalised youth segments. 

• The pilot 2020 programme with UNICEF, GIZ and Grow with Google will see 550 youth impacted, 65% women and 10% refugees, across Africa.

Effective to prove repeatability of the high quality, fully remote, training programme applied in other African contexts.

2) Ecosystem development for the ACN (Select, Train, Accelerate)

• Further Development on the open source-edtech platform (ongoing)

• piloting  training programmes in partnership with African coding schools

  • 3 schools currently in Nigeria and South Africa. 

Effective to build a proof of concept for supporting schools to reach scale, and test the open-source ed-tech platform.