Andela 

Developing a continent of tech experts through a self-funding model of education, enhancing skills sets and reducing global labour gaps

Key facts

• Founded in 2014, Andela¹ is headquartered in New York and has approximately 50 employees. Andela has received $13 million of funding in two rounds.
• Andela is a new kind of technology partner connecting non-traditional workforces with Fortune 500s and start-ups. The company hires and pays talented young Nigerians to learn programming skills before placing them to work virtually on projects in the USA.

Uniqueness

• Andela is ushering in a self-funding model of education, where instead of charging tuition fees they pay their students to learn; students then finance their education through the client work they do upon completing their initial training.
• Andela demonstrates how novel approaches to skills development outside of the formal education system can have a significant impact, providing an example that large corporations and governments could look to emulate in order to leverage the global talent pool.

Value

• Impact on business: Companies are able to benefit from integrating a highly skilled, on-demand workforce into their organization for short periods of time at a competitive price; Andela charges clients about half of what they would pay a domestic developer.
• Impact on society: Andela’s business model could contribute to reducing the global labour gaps and kick-start lifelong careers for young people without debt and without leaving their home countries, aiming to train 100,000 developers across Africa in 10 years.

Approach

• Andela runs an online aptitude test that gauges applicants reasoning and logic skills. It is the most selective training programme on the African continent, accepting around 0.7% of the 15,000 applicants it has received to date. Andela hires 10 people in the region per month and so far has employed 100 people in Lagos.
• Successful applicants undergo a four-year training programme; after six months of joining the programme, Andela places trainees with clients, which so far includes Microsoft and online education platform Udacity.

Andela is one of more than 100 case studies identified as part of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation of Industries initiative.  An overview of the DTI program can be found here.

1. Source: Andela, Wired, WEF/Accenture Analysis