This article has been updated to reflect the true status of Moringa School. It’s not struggling financially and it’s co-founder left the company willingly.
Moringa is set to offer its training courses to startups in Accra, Lagos and Cape Town after it signed a partnership deal with pan-African startup incubator MEST which recently launched in these markets.
These deal will see Moringa offer its 20-week courses at MEST Incubators in Cape Town, Lagos and Accra. As a test drive, Moringa ran Moringa Prep (fundamentals of programming) course at the MEST Accra campus in September 2017.
“We are excited to launch across Africa with an incredible partner like MEST,” says Audrey Cheng, Co-Founder and CEO of Moringa School. “With this partnership, we will be able to train more world-class developers and continue to transform economies across the continent.”
Moringa, which started operations in April 2014 in Nairobi is an offline, trainer-to-student training firm offering courses to Africans in person allowing them to participate in the global code economy. Though offline, Moringa can be compared to Coursera, Codeacademy, Udemy among others. Its biggest competitor in Africa is Andela, the poster-child of African software training and employment with Mark and Chan Zuckerbeg among its investors.
Recently, Moringa launched similar training programmes in Hong Kong, Ghana and Pakistan. The MEST partnership gives it the much needed bridge to become a truly pan-African training platform, able to reach to millions of students across the continent in a few years.
“There is huge demand for an in-person, blended learning course (which brings both the accountability and community of a classroom and our strong outcomes program that connects students to jobs – and also the high-quality content that you can find on MOOCs),” Cheng told TechMoran. “The World Bank did not give us any grants for Hong Kong and Ghana. Those were all revenues coming directly from students. Pakistan is being funded by both the World Bank and Pakistani government because they want to bring our successful model to Pakistan,” she added.
In return, MEST will receive access to the Moringa alumni network and community to recruit for its Accra-based Entrepreneurial Training Program. Every year, MEST selects 60 aspiring entrepreneurs from Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Ivory Coast to apply to join the program, and this partnership will help maintain a strong recruitment pipeline of highly skilled and motivated individuals interested in building globally successful software companies.
Moringa School programs are divided into two courses: Moringa Prep, a five-week intensive program that introduces students to the fundamentals of programming including Javascript for web. Students then progress to Moringa Core, a fifteen-week program where they dive deeper into programming languages and select a focus in Android or full-stack development.
“We are excited to work with them as they continue with a Pan-African expansion,” says Aaron Fu, MEST Africa’s Managing Director. “Our mission is to to unlock resources within the African tech space through a Pan-African network, and working with Moringa to develop tech talent in various parts of the continent is right in the middle of that.”
