DEVCAREER RAISES $100,000 IN GRANTS FOR #LAPTOPS4DEVELOPERS LED BY PLEDGES.
cohort 3 is set to begin in July 2022.
DevCareer, a nonprofit organization based in Nigeria has secured $100,000 in grants to support aspiring African developers with the learning resources necessary to graduate from beginners to intermediates within 3 months led by Pledges. Pledges allow you to build a simplified non-profit team without filing any paperwork. The grant, in addition to Pledges, was contributed by Deimos, Kuda, and Dojah.
Founded by Sultan Akintunde, a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate, DevCareer pioneered the #Laptops4Developers campaign in 2019 to support aspiring African developers with discounted courses and coupons to access premium resources. Since its inception, the campaign was funded largely through donations and pledges from Twitter.
In an interview with Black Tech Pipeline, Sultan recounts the early memories of what would later become DevCareer where he bought courses on Udemy and giveaway to Devs on Twitter who wanted to learn but couldn’t afford them. He was later joined by interested donors, from sharing 4–5 courses, he ended up giving out more than 100paid courses. After some sort of structure was built around the giveaway, the first publicly funded campaign to buy laptops for developers started with this tweet.
The #Laptops4Developers campaign runs a yearly cohort for fledgling software developers with existing knowledge of the subject to benefit from; organized curriculum, mentorship, laptops, and a conducive learning environment equipped with internet and electricity. The campaign in the last two cohorts has successfully trained 72 interns with a significant number working on-site and remotely in technology companies such as Healthtracka, Flutterwave, Bento, Plentywaka etc.
DevCareer in the last cohort received over 6000 applications with Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia featuring as top 4 countries. Rwanda will be joining the list of countries in cohort 3. The COVID19 restriction stalled the campaign in 2021 hence in 2022, DevCareer plans to groom 100 persons into employable African tech talent who can compete on a global stage.
Dipo Aina, Head of Engineering at Kuda one of the returning sponsors of the #Laptops4Developers campaign says “African tech talent has been key to our progress at Kuda, and we’re very happy to support DevCareer again as they continue to do the good work of helping young African software developers find their way in the world.”
The #Laptops4Developers campaign over the last two cohorts focused primarily on Frontend Development, Backend Development, and Mobile Application however, cohort 3 will accommodate more interns including Product Designers; the application is free and each application will be judged by a 3-staged test comprising an aptitude test, coding test, and a physical interview.
The beneficiaries will gain 3 months long training and be assigned a mentor who will walk each person through the program. The interns are also registered with hubs fitted with stable power supply and internet access in their locality. Some of the hubs that have partnered with Devcareer are; CcHub, Impact Hub Wennovation Hub, Aimtoget Hub, Hub30, Rumblecube Makerspace, Olotu Square Hub, Swahilipot, BongoHive and HapaSpace.
We’re excited for the next cohort of #Laptops4Developers and we can’t wait to kick start, says Sultan.
Akintunde stated that cohort 3 is set to begin in July of 2022 with a bit of a twist. DevCareer will adopt a new model whereby an intern who successfully graduates into paid employment will be required to buy a succeeding intern a Laptop. This model employs the “pay-it-forward” attitude as such the number of laptops to be given away is not limited to what is sourced from sponsors/partners; the more the resources, the bigger the outreach.
Words from our amazing Sponsors.
Deimos is a Pan-African technology company that helps Enterprises and SMEs adopt cloud-native engineering patterns, the DevSecOps culture and makes it easier for them to leverage the power of the cloud.
“DevCareers and Deimos share a focus on developing and empowering engineers, we are proud to sponsor and support their mission of helping more individuals get a start in technology. At the core of technology adoption and implementation are the developers; with increased digitisation, plus a fast-growing African tech ecosystem, engineers are in high demand which in turn is leaving a gaping hole in supply. Even with this high demand, Africa is starting to cement itself as a region of enormous engineering capability and capacity. Today’s junior software engineers are tomorrow’s seniors and we are proud to play a part in that.” — Andrew Mori CEO of Deimos.
Enogieru Osasenaga, Grant Portfolio Manager at Pledges says, our focus is on “Helping more people do good”, be it in improving livelihoods or enabling young adults to get better opportunities. Today, we are faced with two realities; Africa has a growing youth population and the rest of the world looking at Africa to source talents. Unfortunately, the formal education systems are overwhelmed resulting in a huge deficit of skilled talents. The silver lining — Tech has provided a solution to this; with minimum barriers to entry and a relatively short learning curve, youths can improve their economic standing as well as those around them. #LaptopsforDevelopers has brought forth an interesting model that not only up-skills youths but ensures that they remain on the same path post the training. We understand that people get to achieve only as far as they can perceive, thus our goal, in this case, is to broaden that horizon so our target communities see limitless possibilities.
Dojah is building an all-in-one Identity verification solution for Africa that will enable digital businesses to build out their onboarding flow faster. Businesses can integrate Dojah’s complete API pack for customer onboarding, data verification, biometric verification, and real-time messaging so they can build and scale.
In partnership with DevCareers, we’re excited to support tech tinkerers and budding developers with the skills needed to join their favourite startups in building smart solutions and inspire an unending flow of creative tech talents for the global community.
DevCareer runs a number of programs with the goal of supporting tech talents such as:
- #Laptops4Developers: A yearly 3-month long program to support aspiring developers and designers on their journey to become word-class with laptops, courses, and mentorships
- A DevCareer community on Slack. Use this link to join over 6000 tech enthusiasts.
- A DevCareerXPrograte partnership that gives 5000 community members access to pro-plan on Prograte to learn any course of choice, exclusive to community members.
