Audrey Cheng, co-founder and CEO Moringa School says that co-founder Frank Tamre left the company he co-founded but willingly and was not evicted or coerced to leave.
Speaking to TechMoran, Cheng, Moringa School co-founder and CEO said, “We didn’t ‘evict’ Frank. It was a mutual understanding and agreement – like any other business partners, we realized our visions didn’t not align.”
Cheng confirmed to TechMoran that she bought out Tamre’s shareholding and the deal was reached amicably. Tamre is set to launch his version of Moringa School but for kids, like Andela’s Teen Code Africa.
“Yeah I love it,” Cheng said of Tamre’s new business idea. “I think it’s an awesome idea and I told him i would do whatever to support the idea.”
Tamre co-founded Moringa School with Audrey Cheng in 2014 after he got bored and walked out of his classes at the University of Nairobi where he was studying Economics, Political Science and French. He also tried to do an accounts degree at Strathmore University but also dropped out. Went back for CPAs but school was not on his mind then. The Mombasa-bred youth then joined a World Bank and m:lab mobile tech entrepreneurship 3 month-accelerator program and later joined Intel to work on a training program for mobile developers.
While at Intel, running training programmes, Frank met Audrey who was then working at Savannah Fund. The Intel mobile program was at m:lab where Savannah Fund was also based. In January 2015, the two then began their coding training school to to fill the gap they had noticed existed in the developer pool.
Earlier today, TechMoran reported that Moringa School is struggling and contributing less value to the country’s developer ecosystem. However, the firm’s official position is different. Moringa School makes money from students tuition fees from its programming students as well as external consultancy for corporate and is doing financially well.
“We are also doing very well financially and are expanding because of our success in Kenya and around the world,” Cheng told TechMoran. “We are becoming recognized as a strong brand that has bootstrapped our way and listened closely to our customers to ensure we are meeting their needs.”
The firm says its dedicated to committing the majority of her profits back to her main mission of transforming higher education in Africa. Moringa School says its creating world-class developers in Africa with the help of its partnership with Hack Reactor and many other coding schools from all around the world.
“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 concluded.
