Building an impact startup in Africa: the Tunga journey continues…

Mid 2015 we embarked on a journey to create 21st century jobs for African youths.

We started what became Tunga, an online intermediary that connects young and skilled African developers to tech businesses all over the world in dire need of professional and affordable software programmers. A platform where you can connect with people who want to work for you before the moment you actually need them.

Now, this might sound very cool — it certainly did to us — but success was all but assured. Building a successful startup is in itself not easy. But even with that in mind, being an impact startup Tunga hasn’t taken the easiest path.

As firm believers in Michael Porter’s Shared Value principle, our aim is to build a company that addresses youth unemployment throughout Africa in a way that builds self empowerment, cultivates human connections, fosters innovation and generates social impact. And importantly, at the same time by doing solid business and becoming financially sustainable as a company. And all this on a shoestring budget.

With that in mind it’s really nice to see the enormous progress we have been able to make so far.

In 2016, we started with a limited first group of semi-vetted coders from Kenya, Uganda and a small group of around 15 pilot clients. Our website was still a shaky prototype without any written line of code yet for what is our current platform.

By year-end, we had a full-fledged core product live; a vetted community of coders in Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria; an advanced quality assurance system; and more than 40 happy clients on 3 continents (Europe, US and Africa).

Curious how we did that? Stay tuned for our next blog about the lessons we learned along the way!