How the pandemic inspired Umuzi to found the African Coding Network

“But how will we play table tennis remotely?”

At the beginning of 2020, Umuzi, the founding member of the ACN was a growing coding school in Johannesburg. It had ±200 unemployed young South Africans on its web development, data science, and UI/X programmes. Umuzi, which means home in isiZulu, had become just that for many talented young people stuck in unemployment, and searching for a way to access promising careers. With over 80% of Umuzi’s 500+ alumni in high productivity tech and creative careers at top South African employers, Umuzi was proud of its track record, and focussed on increasing its direct impact by signing up more employer partners to invest in its growing talent pipeline for scarce digital skills.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 

“Overnight, we were forced to shift to remote learning”

“Overnight, we were forced to shift to remote learning,” shares Hloni Letuka, Umuzi’s Operations Manager recalling the pre-lockdown scramble. “We’d spent years converting a downtown Joburg industrial warehouse into a special open-plan studio, complete with our in-house manufactured furniture and white boards.” The studio’s most popular feature was an undersized table tennis table (a whiteboard turned horizontal with a net) popular with developers blowing off steam between sprints. Hloni and his team worked three days and nights straight to source and issue all Umuzi learners with a computer, 4G dongle, and data before the South African government made coming to places of work or education illegal as they instituted one of the world’s quickest and strictest lockdowns on 26th March. 

At least Umuzi’s recruits now had computer and internet access. But how would they continue to learn without in-person access to Umuzi’s training team?

“Those first weeks of the lockdown were crazy,” recounts Liezel Vorster, Umuzi’s Learner Experience Lead, “All our staff and learners had to adjust to working from home, some on the kitchen counter, others with young children or siblings running between their legs. Everyday there were power cuts, network issues… life was turned upside down.”

“Some learners couldn’t work during the day due to power cuts and network issues. I realised I needed to build something that would allow them to move at their own pace.”

Time seemed to compress, days felt like weeks, weeks like months, as the infections and anxiety grew exponentially. “When we were in the studio, we could manage cohorts of learners as a group, running workshops in-person and setting deadlines. But with remote learning, our attendance and hand-in process was a mess. Some learners couldn’t work during the day due to power cuts and network issues. I realised I needed to build something that would allow them to move at their own pace.” shares Sheena O’Connell, Umuzi’s CTO and architect of Umuzi’s learning platform, Tilde.

Sheena took Umuzi’s curriculum repo, a basic LMS with all the learning content, and broke it into cards. Each card became an object that could appear on a personalised Kanban board she coded up for each learner in Django and React. This enabled learners to prioritise their own work, and move at their own pace.

The Kanban boards were a breakthrough innovation and became the cornerstone of the rapidly developing Tilde learning platform. With Kanban boards and some handy management reporting visualisations, Sheena quickly turned Umuzi’s simple LMS, into a simulated Agile development environment that facilitated self-driven learning.

“Tilde became our new home,” says Lindelani Mthaba, a manager in Umuzi’s Tech Training Team and former champion table tennis champion, “all our workshops had to be recorded, all our code reviews distributed.”

Sheena integrated the code review workflow into each learner's Kanban board, and to help the Umuzi staff cope with a growing backlog, she created a mechanism for learner peer code review, leveraging GitHub.

The results surprised everyone. “At the beginning of lockdown, I was very concerned about learner attendance and progress,” says Liezel, “But Tilde kept almost everyone on track. The lockdown forced us to make a plan, and we did!”

During lockdown, Umuzi learners continued to upskill. Some completed their training, others started remote work experience with employer partners, and others landed full-time jobs. The shift to remote learning was working, and giving Umuzi learners practical experience at the distributed development skills they needed to land a remote job.

Unfortunately, Umuzi had another problem. Like many organisations, the COVID economic crisis infected its revenue, which came mostly from South African companies’ skills development budgets. Companies cut non-core expenses, and unfortunately training, especially unemployed young people, was no longer a priority.

The economic crisis forced Umuzi to cut costs and identify new sources of revenue to keep the organisation afloat, pay its staff, and ensure its learners’ journeys to employment were not derailed by the pandemic.

Umuzi had transitioned surprisingly well to remote learning, thanks to Tilde, but Andrew Levy and Gilbert Pooley, Umuzi’s founders and MDs were increasingly worried about Umuzi’s financial sustainability. 

Johannes Wedenig, a vetran Design Thinker at UNICEF, was one of the many senior figures the Umuzi leaders turned to for advice that anxious April. “It was a long-shot. We’d more or less given up on South African companies helping us out,” confesses Andrew.

“If your pivot to remote learning is going so well, how might others benefit from your learning platform?”

Johannes was encouraging. “If your pivot to remote learning is going so well, how might others benefit from your learning platform?”

That simple question set off a chain reaction. As Andrew and Gilbert debriefed from their Zoom call with Johannes, they began to realise that perhaps Umuzi was just a pivot away from a much bigger opportunity.

Fast forward three months to July, and as Johannesburg faces a surge in COVID infections, Umuzi has fully committed to remote learning, giving up its beloved studio space. However great the sense of loss around this necessary sacrifice to cut costs, it is more than made up for by the momentum rapidly building behind Umuzi’s COVID pivot.

In these intense months, Umuzi has founded the African Coding Network to give other coding schools access to Tilde, its rapidly developing learning platform. ACN’s vision is to develop Tilde, in partnership with other African coding schools, into infrastructure that enables all aspiring African coders to access high quality, self-driven alternative learning pathways to high productivity tech careers.

The ACN has already won an award from Ashoka and HSBC for the most scalable solution in its Future Skills Innovation Challenge. The prize included access to Ashoka’s Fellowship System Change course, which is helping the Umuzi team transform their organisation from a local training provider focussed on direct impact, training individual learners, to a system enabler, scaling its impact by supporting other coding schools to improve their efficiency and effectiveness through its learning platform. 

“Partnering with local schools is key”

The ACN already has a few Nigerian coding schools and South African bootcamps testing Tilde. “Partnering with local schools is key,” explains Warwick Vlantis, Umuzi’s Design Lead and ACN Product Owner, “We know from our own experience that most learners still need the human support of a local partner to check in with them, keep them motivated, and help them solve practical local access issues like power, internet, funding, and links to economic opportunities.”

The ACN’s next steps are to sign up more coding schools to test Tilde across the continent, and explore a sustainable funding and development strategy. Based on Ashoka’s Systems Change course, Umuzi is considering an Open Source strategy to crowd in more developers and grant funding to help develop the platform and make its core functionality free for ACN members. And work out how to play table tennis remotely, of course.