Project summary
DirectEd Development Foundation (DirectEd) is a registered nonprofit organisation delivering free training and internships in state-of-the-art software development, soft skills and entrepreneurship to high-potential under-resourced students in Africa right after high school. DirectEd’s 2025 vision is to increase the expected lifetime earnings of the 5000 students taking part in our program by $40 million.
What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?
The Challenge
The century of digital transformation is here, but companies are struggling to find workers with the right skills. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2026, the shortage of software engineers in the US will exceed 1.2 million. In Europe, the shortage of IT professionals amounted to 0,5 million and even before the pandemic, 38% of companies in Europe report that they plan to outsource more in the next 2 years. With a looming recession, tech companies are facing pressures to reduce costs. This is a great opportunity for talented students all across Africa, but to unlock this untapped potential, they need resources and high-quality training.
The Goal
The purpose of DirectEd’s program is to prepare students for remote employment as software engineers by equipping them with the most sought-after digital and soft skills on the market, thereby fostering the next generation of African technology leadership.
We first take our students with no prior coding experience through our intro course which only requires a mobile phone before taking them through an intensive coding bootcamp covering full-stack web development, various soft skills and entrepreneurship before finally giving graduates an opportunity to be remote interns with Western tech firm partners. With this experience in hand, students will be in a position to embark on a career as remote engineers or tech entrepreneurs.
Achievements to date
Within just a year, more than 150 students participated in our Introductory Course. 50% of them have or will soon proceed to DirectEd Bootcamp. More than 50% of graduates from our Kenyan pilot are currently working as paid remote software developer interns for several Western tech partners. The income of students who have entered these programs has increased by several orders of magnitude compared to peers.
We already have a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with 3 National High Schools in Kenya: Kagumo High, Maryhill Girls High, and Mang’U High. We also have MoUs with Ngong Road Children’s Foundation in Nairobi and Kotebe University of Education in Addis Ababa. We also have a strong relationship with YALI EA and Kenyatta University where we held both our Bootcamp launch event and Graduation ceremony.
Suggested Program
With the help of the Manifund community, we would like to continue our current success by scaling up our efforts in Kenya. To this end, our goal is to onboard at least 10 more high schools in 2024, following the model we have piloted with our four Kenyan partners in 2023.
Our programme has six phases: (1) identification and onboarding of high school partners, (2) a 6-day remote Introductory Course for partner school alumni, (3) DirectEd Bootcamp enrolment based on Introductory Course performance, (4) Access Scholarship (laptop, wifi, tutorial vouchers) crowdfunding, enabling needy students to participate in the Bootcamp, (5) internship placement with partnering tech firms, (6) employment as remote software engineers.
The Introductory Course is based on Harvard’s open-sourced CS50 Python course. The DirectEd Bootcamp is an intensive 3-month remote bootcamp utilising open-sourced content and bespoke projects, exercises, soft skills and entrepreneurship training developed by our team and expert guest lecturers from global top universities and incubators. You can view curricula and a final project demo by one of our students.
How will this funding be used?
Depending on the amount of money raised, we will be able to achieve different things.
Funding Goal
Our primary funding goal relates to our largest expense and primary impact bottleneck: hardware. As a remote program, our operational costs are low. However, many of the high-potential students we take in come from needy families without the means to purchase a laptop, WiFi and pay for mobile data bundles. We bundle this support and call it "Access Scholarship".
Each "Access Scholarship" costs $500 and our goal is to raise enough to cover 40 laptops. However, for this fundraiser, we will only set the goal of 10 laptops.
Our secondary funding goal is to get some initial capital necessary to launch an "Impact Certificate" token for the upcoming "Access Scholarship" cohort. This means that investors will be able to invest in fractionalised shares of the impact for the remaining 30 "Access Scholarship" students. There will be some fixed set-up costs to make this successful (operational, legal and marketing), and so we estimate this to cost around $1000 (marketing being variable).
If only the minimum of $500 is raised then that would be used to cover one Access Scholarship. Further scholarships will be financed in increments of $500. Amounts outside multiples of $500 will be used to pay for part of the operational costs involved with setting up "Impact Certificate" tokens for the remaining 30 Access Scholarships we hope to fund.
Not included
Lastly, and mostly for completeness, we would like to raise funding so that more core team members in the leadership team can work on this full-time. Out of all 15 people involved in the project at the moment, only two people receive any type of pay (part-time) for the work - one in Kenya and one in Ethiopia. This is a stretch goal and we are currently actively seeking out funding from grant-makers to this end.
Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?
As mentioned above, DirectEd Development Foundation was born in the fall of 2021 so it has been active for quite some time. It filed to become registered as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation summer of 2022 and was approved by the Charity Commission of England and Wales in August 2023.
There are a lot of people contributing to DirectEd - currently, more than 20 people contributing as volunteers part-time. You can see all active contributors, volunteers, core staff, advisors and trustees here. We shall here include a selection of the core members who are ready to work full-time on this if funding is found.
Simon Sällström (CEO) holds an MPhil in economics from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Economics and Political Science from Lund univeristy. He is the former president of Lund Debate Society and has held leadership roles at several other NGOs
Moses Kahure (Kenya Lead) holds a BSc in Diagnostic Medicine from Kenyatta University, with 6 years as COO at Save a Youth Africa (SAYA), demonstrating passion for empowering youth. He is also a Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI) Fellow in Cohort 30.
Christine Karimi (Chief Examiner) Educator and Software Engineer at DirectEd, specializes in full-stack web development and is passionate about technology. With a bachelor's in Education, she's trained over 200 junior developers at Moringa School - East Africa's market-leading coding bootcamp.
Kidus Elias (Curriculum Design Lead), from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, holds a BSc in Computer Science. Studying learning experience design at the LXD Academy, he is passionate about education, gamification, volunteerism, and software development.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)
There are three categories of concern.
Students. There's a risk that we fail to garner enough interest in our target population, meaning we get much fewer students expressing interest and participating in the Intro Course and later the Bootcamp. This means we have a smaller talent pool to work with, and possibly not enough good candidates to present to the tech internship firms. Students may also be not motivated to continue. There may also be regulatory risks in terms of us raising attention from local governments for our use of blockchain and facilitating training to students in Kenya online without a licence (which we should not need since we are not making any claims of being a formal vocational training institution).
Firm internships. We may fail to find enough tech partner firms to place our students with upon finishing the bootcamp. This would mean that a much lower number of students are given the most important part of our training and our impact would then also be lower. Finding these tech partners will require extensive networking and showcasing of what the past students were able to build with the current partners.
Staffing. Last year, we had a budget to pay all Africa-based team members for their work. This year, we do not have this budget so all work is done entirely voluntarily. This means that the team is not able to take days off from regular work as that would sacrifice income, meaning we don't get as many hours invested in ensuring quality or the team members are burnt out from working a full-time job alongside these commitments (on weekends and so on).
What other funding are you or your project getting?
At the moment, we have no other funding source secure. We are of course applying for other grants but have not received any positive indication of any successful grant application as of today (December 17th).