How do you go about improving a system, especially one as complex as education? Through the Ashoka / HSBC future skills challenge, a team from a South African coding school, Umuzi, discovered their COVID pivot to a more scalable, continent-wide initiative, called the African Coding Network.
This is a behind the scenes story of how Umuzi went from training software developers in-person in Johannesburg to establishing the African Coding Network to leverage their edtech platform to enable coding schools across the continent to select, train, and accelerate tech careers at scale.
What’s broken in the current African tech education system?
Too many young Africans are un- or under-employed because they lack access to pathways that lead to high productivity jobs like software development and data science. While the African tech sector has grown significantly over the last few years, the supply of African tech talent lags behind - a huge lost opportunity for the many unemployed youth, and their communities.
African youth have few education options that lead to tech careers. To begin our systems change journey, we investigated four elements that constrain the existing tech education system.
Traditional higher education isn’t demand-driven
Traditional higher education in Africa fails to meet demand, with only 9% of Africans accessing tertiary education of some kind, in comparison to 45% of their OECD peers. In addition, educating tech professionals appears to be a low priority. Consider South Africa: only 2,750 computer scientists were trained in 2017, far fewer than other STEM specialties like traditional engineering (12,500 graduates). Worse, the growth in computer science graduates in South Africa between 2014 - 2017 is a measly 1%, which is failing to keep pace with the rapid expansion of the African tech sector.
Online learning is scalable but often fails in low-resource contexts
Online learning has the promise to democratise access to knowledge, but alone it doesn't develop the behaviours, experience, and network which lead to high-value careers. Online learning platforms have notoriously low course completion rates, averaging between 5-15 percent. On top of this, Africans face infrastructure challenges that remain barriers to entry such as lack of reliable power and internet connections, as well as high data costs.
Local coding schools can be effective, but their high cost makes them inaccessible, limiting their scale
African coding schools have proven to be a successful education alternative. For instance, more than 80% of Umuzi’s learners secure professional developer jobs. However, bootcamps remain out of reach for most Africans due to their high direct costs (such as tuition and transport) and indirect costs (such as the opportunity cost of not working) to attend full-time, in-person training. This can make coding schools exclusive and inaccessible, as we saw when Andela became more competitive to get into than Harvard.
The challenge of scaling tech education
Umuzi found a dichotomy at the heart of African tech education:
Online learning offers scale but lacks local support critical for overcoming local infrastructure challenges in low resource contexts; African coding schools offer local support but are limited in their ability to scale.
The Umuzi team unpacked this dichotomy through Ashoka’s System Change course. To understand scale, they looked at analogous examples from other industries. Uber is very scalable - what infrastructure makes it possible for their service to scale? Uber relies on roads, cars and drivers. For Airbnb, the infrastructure might be houses and homeowners (hosts). For Google, it’s PCs, mobile devices, internet access and content on the web. Scalable solutions in tech are fundamentally underpinned by infrastructure, and if that infrastructure doesn’t exist, you’ve got to build it. Arguably, building the infrastructure - the non-scalable assets and resources - is a bigger task than building the tech. That’s why tech solutions leverage existing infrastructure.
For Umuzi to train thousands of developers it would take a massive investment in infrastructure: operations across multiple African cities, a large staff of facilitators, and employer and youth networks in each location. But wearing the lens of leveraging infrastructure, Umuzi realised that this infrastructure already exists. African coding schools, just like Umuzi, have established operations all over Africa, with youth and employer networks, local staff and deep local market knowledge.
This led to a fundamental question: how can we partner with existing coding schools to be the infrastructure to scale tech education across Africa?
Coding schools as infrastructure
The barriers to entry in African education are not only high for young Africans, there are many obstacles to overcome to be a successful coding school. Coding schools must select the right candidates, train them to an employable level in hard and soft skills, and help young professionals enter the job market. In addition to these core tasks, there are periphery tasks such as accreditation and maintaining up-to-date curriculum, all while running a sustainable business. Umuzi learned to solve these problems for the specifics of the South African market. Through the Systems Change course, they started unpacking which of their solutions was particular to their local challenges, and which were common to all coding schools. The result was an important distinction between:
local infrastructure challenges - particular to a country, city, or local area - typically these have non-scalable solutions e.g. building a local youth network for recruitment; offering a physical location or computer and internet access to each learner.
common challenges - common to all coding schools, regardless of region - typically these have scalable solutions e.g. curriculum development; code review processes.
From their own experience, and talking to coding schools across the continent, Umuzi realised that most schools are frantically innovating to solve both local infrastructure and common challenges. But every coding school need not reinvent the wheel. This is the equivalent of Uber drivers coding their own hailing apps and designing their own vehicles. Coding schools need an off-the-shelf app and car dealership to lower their costs of delivery.
This insight lead to Umuzi’s Systems Change approach:
To address Africa’s digital skills shortage, we need to support African coding schools with scalable solutions to overcome their many common challenges. This will enable them to focus their limited time and resources on being excellent at solving their local infrastructure challenges.
To this end, Umuzi has established the African Coding Network, partnering with existing coding schools to be the infrastructure to scale tech education across Africa. To achieve this, Umuzi is offering its edtech solutions (demand-driven curriculum and learning material, simulated Agile working environment, peer-to-peer code reviews) as an Open Source learning platform that members of the network can use and contribute towards.
If you are, or know of, an African coding school or tech bootcamp, or anyone interested in partnering to address pan-African digital skills shortages, please get in touch: acn@umuzi.org