Tech startup, Andela, is poised to boost the number of its African software developers working on projects for firms across the world in tenfold. Its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeremy Johnson explains the strategy to African Business.
With its cosy nap-pods, outdoor yoga and exercise area and cushioned canoe sofa said to evoke New York’s Hudson River, the trendy north Lagos office of Andela appears to have been lifted straight out of Silicon Valley.
Yet, amid the open plan desks and side-offices where you would expect to find coders straight out of Stanford or MIT, ambitious Nigerian software developers knuckle down on projects for companies based thousands of miles away.
Founded in 2014 and with additional campuses in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Andela’s ambitious goal is to train distributed software teams from scratch, using African talent before hiring them out to work on projects for international clients.
After five years of rapid growth, culminating in the hiring of some 1,100 developers across the continent, Andela’s unashamedly private sector model has attracted the backing and financial support of some of the US’s most prominent investment luminaries.
The firm is set to embark on the next phase of its expansion, following the completion of a $100million funding round in January led by former US Vice-President Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and others, bringing total venture funding to $180million.
Yet with high-profile investors comes a new level of pressure and scrutiny as the firm attempts to boost tenfold the number of its African developers while proving to a sceptical world that the continent’s development talent can compete on an international level.
Speaking to African Business, co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson says that the software world is rapidly waking up to the vast untapped potential of Africa’s development talent.
“Over the past five years there’s been a significant shift to comfort with remote and distributed software development teams and we’ve spent a lot of time helping companies to do that wel…’’
A firm that identifies and develops Africa’s most talented software engineers to help firms with high-performing teams, Andela, has graduated the first set of developers to have completed their four-year Fellowship.
Now Andela alumni, the app developers are expected to join global and local companies, start their own ventures, or take senior developer roles at Andela to continue building the next generation of tech leaders at the company.
Over 300 dignitaries attended the ceremony in Lagos , including families of the developers completing the Fellowship and Andela workers. Also in attendance were industry stakeholders, such as Osita Nwoye, Executive Director at Tech Circle; Etop Ikpe, Co-founder and CEO of Cars45; Bankole Oluwafemi, Founder and Editor-In-Chief at Tech Cabal; and Judith Okonkwo, CEO Imisi3D.
Senior Partner at TLcom and Board member of Andela, Dr Omobola Johnson, who delivered the keynote address, said: “Andela has cemented its position as the company that invests in Africa’s most talented software engineers, and I am proud to be celebrating the Fellows’ commitment and successes after four years of hard work. The 18 developers who have completed their Fellowship should be really proud of themselves. I’m excited and eagerly looking forward to seeing them flourish in their tech careers. You are the proof of the Andela narrative that brilliance is evenly distributed.”
During their years at Andela, developers have completed a rigorous technical leadership programme, acquiring management experience and technical expertise in software languages such as Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and React Native, among others. They’ve worked as full-time team members with global companies, such as Viacom, Github, InVision, and Wema Bank’s ALAT, via Andela’s distributed work model.
Andela Co-Founder & Director of Launchpad, Nadayar Enegesi said over the past four years, Andela developers have played a pivotal role in building technology communities across Africa. “We are excited to see our early cohorts start on the next stage of their journey.
“We’ve created a programme, Launchpad, to help developers navigate their next steps and prepare them to be fully immersed as key players in the tech ecosystem. Our mission has always been to build a network of world class technology leaders on the African continent, and now that we’re launching our first set of Andela alumni, this is the crucial moment in the company’s history where we see our mission and values manifest across Africa. Life at Andela does not end after four years; we are a family; we are bound together on this journey to bring African engineering excellence to the global market. Once an Andelan, always an Andelan,” he said.
Andela, the company that is building a network of technology leaders on the African continent, on Saturday March 10, hosted the Andela Women in Technology Summit 2018.
The event, in celebration of International Women’s Day, further reinforces Andela’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.
The conference, hosted at EPIC Tower in Lagos, led with the theme ‘Investing in Tomorrow’s Leaders.’ Over 100 women in tech and business met to take part in lively discussion and debate with Andela’s female executives, senior technologists and developers, including Director of People and Culture, Taiwo Judah Ajayi; Talent Acquisition Manager, , Jessica Akano; Product Manager, Feyikemi Olabiyi and Technology Leadership Evangelist, Mercy Orangi.
They were also joined by Lagos’ leading female tech influencers including Keynote Speaker Chika Uwazie alongside the CHIEF Technology Officer & Engineering Lead at Tress App, Esther Olatunde; Android Engineer at OffGrid Electric, Moyinoluwa Adeyemi ; General Manager, LASPARK Lagos, Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola and[General Manager, MEST, Neku Atawodi, who discussed the role of stakeholders and leaders in promoting diversity in the tech community.
The event concluded with a fireside chat, named after the theme, with Executive Director, Junior Achievement Nigeria, Simi Nwogugu and moderated by Communications Manager, Andel, Oluwasola Obagbemi .
Since launching in 2014, Andela has played an instrumental role in paving the way for women in the tech industry through its commitment to attracting and developing female talent. The company’s various initiatives include multiple all-female recruitment cycles as well as building safe and empowering communities for women in tech, such as Tech in Pink and Ladies in Tech.
According to Ajayi: “A lack of a strong, cohesive culture is holding the tech industry back from building more female leaders and executives, which is why the leading women in tech need to start the discussions and ask how we, as women in tech, can inspire other women to be future leaders.”
“The aim of the Women in Tech Summit is to celebrate how far women have come in the tech ecosystem and to connect women in tech — both leaders and aspirants. And what better time to do this than on the week of International Women’s Day? The women interested in pursuing a career in tech are many, but the mentors and investors are few. Now is the time to have an open discussion on how we can stop our future leaders from slipping through the cracks. Today, we are building the biggest platform yet for women technologists and calling for more people to invest in tomorrow’s leaders.”
Since launching operations in 2014, Andela has received more than 75,000 applicants and accepted over 600 software developers, of which 26 per cent are female (compared to the global average of seven per cent). The company aims to make the Women in Tech Summit an annual landmark event in celebration of International Women’s Day.
Andela, the company that builds high-performing engineering teams with Africa’s most talented software developers, has secured $40M in Series C funding.
With offices in Lagos, Nigeria, Nairobi, Kenya, and Kampala, Uganda, Andela has hired 500 developers to date — the top 0.7 per cent of more than 70,000 applicants from across the continent.
A statement said the investment was led by pan-African venture firm CRE Venture Capital with participation from DBL Partners, Amplo, Salesforce Ventures, and Africa-focused TLcom Capital.
Existing investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, and Spark Capital also participated. The round, which marks one of the largest investments ever led by an African venture firm into an Africa-based company, brings Andela’s total venture funding to just over $80M.
Andela was launched in 2014 to combat the global technical talent shortage by investing in Africa’s most talented software developers.
With an estimated 1.3M software jobs unfilled in 2016 in the U.S. alone, it’s clear that the growth of today’s major technology ecosystems is inhibited by a severe lack of talent.
To solve this, Andela invests in high potential pools of brainpower across the African continent to help more than 100 partner companies build distributed engineering teams. These partners range from industry leaders like Viacom and Mastercard Labs to high-growth technology companies such as Gusto and GitHub.
Selected developers spend six months in a rigorous onboarding program before being matched with one of Andela’s partner companies as full-time engineering team members.
Beyond recruiting elite development talent, Andela is catalyzing the growth of tech ecosystems across the continent by open-sourcing its content and partnering with organizations including Google, Pluralsight and Udacity to provide resources and mentorship to developers.
“Andela is investing in our continent’s future technology leaders, who are already playing a much-needed role in solving both African and global problems,” said Country Director Andela Nigeria, Seni Sulyman.
“With each new partnership, we are simultaneously proving to the global tech industry that brilliance is evenly distributed irrespective of gender, culture or nationality. As we unleash an entire generation of technologists, we will secure Africa’s role as an equal partner working alongside the rest of the world to advance human potential.”
Endowed with energy and unique talents for using technology to solve problems, information technology development experts from Nigeria are filling the gaps in the US technology sector, writes HANNAH OJO.
Grit and gumption was the phrase that came to mind as Tolulope Komolafe, a Nigerian software developer, sat across Fareed Zakaria of Cable News Network (CNN). In a recently aired interview on the international medium, Tolu appeared on the show with Jeremy Johnson, co-founder of Andela, an American tech start-up filling high tech openings in the US by looking to African software developers. With campuses in Lagos and Nairobi, Andela engineers specialise in several tech stacks, including JavaScript, Pyhton, Ruby, PHP and mobile software.
Back home in Lagos Nigeria, Tolu sits across the reporter at the cafeteria of Andela’s head office in Yaba. Dressed in a pair of jeans and sleeveless top, she clutched her Apple laptop wrapped in a pink cover.
Going down memory lane as the reporter asked about her high moments, she said: “The first time I handled my real life application, I felt on top of the world. When I started working in a firm based in New York, that was a very brave moment and I was elated to be working with the best hands in the world.
“There is simply no gap. Looking back two years ago when I joined Andela, if someone had told me it would be this great, I would have doubted it.”
Fortune, they say, favours the bold. She had muscled her way through boulders by teaching herself how to code right from her time as a student at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Oyo state. She confessed that as an undergraduate studying computer science in school, programming was portrayed as a boring concept. Her epiphany came with an opportunity to engage in a four-month industrial training with a Lagos based IT firm. That became her starting point with software development.
She said: “I met a woman who was my boss, and she was really good. I saw what she was doing and I was like ‘this thing could actually be fun’. So I started teaching myself how to programme from there.”
Returning back to school after the expiration of her industrial training programme, academic rigours made it too difficult for her to continue programming, but she seized another opportunity to continue coding when she was posted to teach in a school for her National Youth Service. Investing her spare time on learning how to code turned out a worthy investment in the process of time.
The computer wizkid didn’t tarry long in the labour market after completing the youth service programme. She was considering taking up an offer of employment when she came across a tweet announcing Andela’s call for application in 2014. The catchphrase “we will help you become a world class software developer and still pay you,” got her hooked, even though she affirmed the offer sounded too good to be true. She competed for space against 2500 other applicants and made the cut for the final 20 selected for a 4 year fellowship with Andela.
With a petite frame and a bright countenance, Tolu is one of the success stories of Andela. She has visited New York to work with firms she develops applications for. On the set of the CNN interview, Jeremy, Andela’s co-founder affectionately referred to Tolu as one of the brilliant people he had yet to see solving problems with technology.
From her Andela office in Lagos, Tolu works for a company based in New York where she is building an application which allows people to put all the information about their lives in a place. She is also involved in programmes which encourage women to come into technology, especially software development.
“The end goal is to get more women into Andela”, the 26 year old Tolu enthusiastically announced.
The deliberate effort to encourage more female developers is connected with the gender gap in Andela, since only 18 percent of developers engaged with the firm are females. A female-only recruitment cycle and boot camps in Lagos and Nairobi were recently introduced by Andela to scout for more female tech talents. There is also the “She Loves Code” initiative where female programmers mentor other young women and host events in communities.
In an industry that exerts the stamina of men, Tolu is one of the few ladies holding her own in a men’s preserve. How does she dispel the gender myth? Her reply underscores the basic requirement women need to be top notch software engineers.
She said: “It is the same thing that every guy needs to be a good software developer. Culture wise, I would say our parents have not done a very good job of telling their female children they can do anything and go into any job. I was lucky because my mum is a strong woman, so I grew up thinking there is nothing a guy can do that I cannot do”.
For women considering diving into the tough turfs, she offered a piece of advice: “I will say the future is in our hands and we have to choose the outcome of how we want it to be. For women out there, never think that you are a woman. Just do it! I’d like to think of myself as being sexless. That is the way I approach anything I want to do.”
Changing the world one code at a time
As Mohini Ugeli, a media associate for Andela conducted the reporter round the Andela campus; talents, energy and brawn were on display. Order meets finesse as the young soft ware engineers are busy with work on their personal computers (PCs). Some, with the aid of their ear piece warmed up to the music that played in the background as they work on disruptive technologies changing the world.
A recent event which shook the IT space in Nigeria was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to the country. It was not surprising that he made a stopover at Andela. The firm attracted about $24 million of funding from a scheme led by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative.
Playing down the fact that Zuckerberg’s visit gave Andela more popularity in the tech circle, Nadayar Enegesi, 25, who is head of learning and development at Andela told The Nation that the bigger value of the visit was more internal.
Nadayar said: “There are many young people aspiring to have that level of success. The moment you meet somebody who has achieved a dream similar to yours, it feels more tangible. That belief that you can succeed at that level is very important. We had a lot of people saying this guy ( Zuckerberg) who did this thing is human just as I am and he did not have Andela when he started.”
Since 2014, Andela has screened more than 40, 000 applicants across Africa and accepted the top 0.7 to work at its bases in Lagos and Nairobi. With this ration, the firm prides itself as being more selective than Harvard and Stanford.
Reacting to the selection rate, Nadayar, a graduate of computer science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, who had built tech products for companies in Toronto before moving to Lagos in 2014, affirmed that the basic requirement for being a software engineer is more of personality disposition.
He said: “You need to have some resilience and be willing to expose yourself to new experiences. You need to have a natural tendency towards self-learning. But for the more concrete skills, you need to be the type of person who enjoys solving problems.”
Dispelling the myth that being a technologist requires a solid strength in understanding numbers, Nadayar explained that some Andela fellows had background in media, publishing as well as agriculture. “Some don’t even have a degree’, he said.
“A lot of what programming is about is just breaking down problems into steps and figuring how to connect those steps to create a solution. You couple that ability to learn with the ability to solve problems and the willingness to throw yourself at different opportunities.
“Also, being open to learning new technology and solving problems with technology is a plus. That is the ground zero recipe for becoming a technologist.”
Jeremy Johnson who cofounded Andela with Christina Sass, Ian Carnevale and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, was quoted as saying that coders from Africa could fill what U.S. tech companies say is a shortage of qualified engineers. While exposing Nigerian IT developers to clients such as Microsoft, IBM Apple and other high tech companies, Andela is specific on wanting the young developers who have been exposed to the global tech scene to keep their talents at home.
With Andela’s relative success in the tech industry, the firm still battles with the challenge of internet, real estate and affordable infrastructure, The Nation learnt.
Other teething technology start – ups in the country are not exempted from the aforementioned challenges. Some also have to combat with low access to funds, among other problems.
Only recently, the Lagos State Government unveiled “Code Lagos”, a computer programming initiative geared towards meeting the demand for technical skills. The initiative according to the Lagos state governor, Mr Akinwunmi Ambode , is in recognition of the importance of harnessing the power of technology for a better workforce.
Is there a sideline to tech export?
Babatope
As technological advancement is rapidly transforming work place with creativity and innovation, some analysts have posited that the export of tech talents could be a threat to local firms since there is a need for more software talents and programmers to make the technology industry build capacity and scale up.
Babatope Falade-Onikoyi, a knowledge economy advocate who made this position known, however, added that there is an opportunity for local firms to train more people and sponsor policies and initiatives poised towards producing more talents.
He said: “Government needs to create policies and laws to promote the knowledge economy. We need to get government and private firms to ensure that information industries, particularly computing is made a core subject from primary levels up to senior secondary level. We can no longer pay lip or mild service to computer education. Nigeria’s desktop penetration rate is 4.5 percent. We need to equip schools with computer labs and computers”.
The knowledge economy advocate also harped on the need for Nigeria to track how many developers and core computing skills there are per capita.
With regard to creating more awareness on the importance of tech skills, he called for the training of more teachers in technology as well as a partnership between the private sector and government, which will see to providing learning equipment and sponsoring awards for STEM courses.
On the advantage of Nigerian-born tech talents filling up US tech spaces, Falade-Onikoyi asserted that Nigeria stands to benefit from remittances in foreign currency as well as the positioning of Nigeria as a country with potential in human capital.
“This sort of knowledge economy branding is what India is enjoying. In 2015, India’s services sector recorded revenues of 120billion dollars”, he said.
