DevCareer: Get Familiar
In a bid to attempt to demystify tech, solve problems in Africa with tech and build more positive tech savvy youths, DevCareer was created.
Who We Are
DevCareer is a non-profit tech organization that’s aimed at supporting upcoming developers in Africa with resources to excel into World Class developers. It is a well known fact that underdeveloped African countries lack greatly adequate resources to join and thrive in the Tech world. This was exactly what Hack Sultan had in mind when he created DevC. As someone who is a major tech ecosystem developer living in Nigeria, he decided to focus on building beginners to intermediate developers.
Having realized that there’s a talent pipeline but 80+% of budding developers are stuck at the beginner stage for one major reason which is lack of resources. They includes but are not limited to the following:
- No electricity
- No good laptops( a lot of people learn with their mobile phones) and because of this, we have lesser number of developers going into other fields like .NET, C#, App dev, Cloud, AR, ML and Python. That’s because learning with a mobile phone is only good with Learning web development( and that’s just about 20% of it). It’s not possible to learn React, Angular, Vue, node and others on your phone.
- Good Mentorship
The resulting effect is that we have continued to build mediocre developers year in year out. The few good developers available are doing fine and not necessarily available/sufficient for the market. Also, the ones that want to learn have little or no resources to push forward. Of course, some top organizations give out thousands of courses, but how effective are they if the people taking these courses don’t have resources to learn properly?
How do we solve the problem?
We organize a 3-month mentorship program for Tech newbies for free. We give the mentees access to a series of courses related to their chosen tech paths i.e Front End web development, Back end web development etc. Of course, they get mentors and resources to see them through the program. They also get to learn in a nice environment with access to fast internet and stable power supply. We also have a structure that lets them learn remotely and still show dedication. We believe that if they can learn remotely steadily for 3 months, then they can definitely work remotely continuously. At the end of the program, the participants get benefits like job placements (even during the program), internship opportunities abroad and even legal advice on how to pitch.
Our Journey so far
The plan was to train 20 participants for the first cohort and knowing that not having a laptop would have been a major constraint to learning, sometime in March 2019, Hack Sultan put out a tweet for the #laptop4developers campaign.
This campaign was aimed at getting laptops (new, old or damaged) and cash donations for laptops from individuals so, each participant in the DevC program who doesn’t already own a laptop gets to use one through out the period of the program (which solves the issue of not having a laptop being a hindrance to learning tech). The campaign was the first publicly funded project is Nigeria.
On the 26th of May 2019, the target (£5,000) for the campaign was met and we started the selection process (which was in 4 stages). We had about 2000 interested candidates who signed up within the first 48 hours of introducing this program.
The first cohort started with 22 devs (8 females and 14 males) from 3 states and in 4 locations in August, 2019. We currently have them across 4 fields namely; Front end development (with React), Back end development (with NodeJs), Android (with Java and Kotlin), Data science (with Python). Of course, it wouldn’t have been possible without the donations, our mentors and our partners. So far, we’ve had 22+ mentors, 48+ donations and 8 partnerships.
Going forward
We intend to do more as we have started planning towards our second #laptop4developers cohort in which we’ll be supporting 50 developers across 5 states in Nigeria and Zambia. Our target for the second cohort is £10,000. Donations are welcome. You can find ways to support the program here.
