Kodluyoruz (“We Code the Future”)

We need disruptive innovation to make education systems responsive to the heightened pace of technology and changing labor needs. If we can bridge the skills gap in tech and youth unemployment, we can help millions have decent jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. Our solution is to adapt education to the demands of the new economic order. Kodluyoruz is a social enterprise that understands the local market needs, then builds flexible, modular, free of charge bootcamps and communities that provide marginalized youth with the necessary skills. What we are building today will strengthen the foundations of future universities: A skills-focused, modular education system where youth can manage their learning and create their own diplomas through the micro-credentials they gain through flexible, demand-driven content. As we scale our solution threefold annually, we aim to provide a pathway to all youth to land in decent jobs and realize their potential to build fulfilling lives.

Youth unemployment is increasing all around the world, undermining people's potential, reducing the wellbeing of youth, leading to isolation and poverty. Only in Turkey, 25% of youth are unemployed. More than half of the 1.8 billion young people (aged 10-24) worldwide will not have the right skills for the workforce soon in the future (UN). Kodluyoruz works to address the root cause of this problem.

The root cause is about the unsynchronized pace of economy and education systems. Industry 4.0 requires people to have new skills. It is the role of education systems to help people gain these skills; but schools are lagging behind. The foundations of schools have not changed much since 1860s. We still expect every person to go through ‘factory model’ schools and graduate with skills signalled with a static diploma. It is this system that controls and decides what the youth learns, but it is failing now as the skills mismatch and increasing youth unemployment shows. Instead, the power of flexible learning should be in the hands of youth themselves – giving them a chance for discovering their potential.

We understand the local market needs and then build flexible, modular training programs that can provide the youth with the necessary technology skills to land in decent jobs. Our two programs are:

Kodluyoruz Academy: Provides bootcamps (3-4 month technical and soft skills trainings) that prepare driven unemployed/underemployed young people, ages 18-29 with special focus on women and refugees, for employment in high-value technology fields with a talent shortage. The content is prepared and presented by professionals actively working in the tech sector, which ensures that content is demand-driven. This skills-focused, modular education system allows youth to manage their own learning and create their own diplomas in a flexible, demand-driven content. Our bootcamps are in web, mobile, data science&machine learning, and game development. We also developed a decentralized bootcamp model with the help of our bootcamp Alumni.  Decentralized bootcamps adopt a blended learning approach, where youth complete online courses with the help of local peer-to-peer, local study groups. 

Alumni Club: A lifelong learning community for our graduates, bringing youth together to find solutions to their own problems. Our Alumni train other youth around them through online or in-person study groups, creating a multiplier impact.

Our solution serves unemployed/underemployed youth ages 18-29, especially women and refugees. 

Kodluyoruz provided bootcamps for 800 people in three years: 200 in the first two years and 600 only in 2019. Only in 2020, we are training 2.000 youth at in-class bootcamps and 30.000 youth in decentralized bootcamps. The graduation rate is 80%; and 65% of graduates found employment in tech in 3 months of graduation. Many times, our graduates told us that our bootcamp provided more skills than their university degree. 

45% of our students are women. We work in 12 cities, including remote places. For instance, a mother from a lagged behind city started working as a freelance web developer after our bootcamp, changing her life. 

We also create ripple effects thanks to Alumni Club: One of our students in Niğde realized a problem in the agriculture sector and developed a solution with the help of technology. He then mobilized his classmates and they are now starting the second software company in the city! 

Our approach also changes the mindset of the employers. Around 50 employers we work with have started to expect ‘skills’ rather than ‘good university degrees’ in their hiring practices.

1)We understand the skills development needs of the marginalized youth and provide a free-of-charge program to them. In this way, all youth have access to the skills they need either through our decentralized or in-class bootcamps no matter where they live in Turkey. 

2)Creating jobs is at the core of our business model. 

3)We provide skills in the emerging tech fields providing high-value employment. 

4)Our Alumni Community creates a life-long learning environment. The existence of this community ensures that our graduates stay in touch and updated with the most recent skills needs.

There are many coding bootcamps all over the world. But Kodluyoruz is innovative because:

1) We combine low cost, scalable operations with quality. We are the first and only program in Turkey providing both free-of-charge and top-quality training for youth. We attract the best developers to become our trainers and pay them hourly to teach in our bootcamps during the weekend. This advantage and our lean operations help us keep the costs low (total cost per beneficiary is $150 while we receive around $700 from companies after every successful job placement) - so, we can scale up our operations easily. Most importantly, this proof of model enables us and other stakeholders to replicate the desired impact anywhere in Turkey and beyond.

2) We created the first bootcamp program in Turkey adapting itself to the local conditions. We primarily understand the needs of the local market, cultural aspects, and the need of the local youth and then decide on the content of our bootcamp. This data-driven, flexible approach maximizes employment opportunities within the community.

3) We created a community that cares about the world. Our Alumni Club is unique since our graduates have a strong sense of ‘giving back’ which creates a ripple effect. The decentralized bootcamps that our Alumni leads adopt a blended learning approach, where youth complete online courses together.  As our Alumni continue training others, Kodluyoruz expands its impact to thousands of youth.

Our business model relies on technology to function since we provide skills to people to land in good jobs in tech. We prioritized the tech sector because algorithmic and computational thinking skills will soon be required by any job in any sector, not only technology-intensive industries. By providing these skills in a flexible learning model, we will create the workforce equipped with these skills. Only this would allow youth to land in decent jobs and foster economic growth. Therefore, we rely on technology so much that it is a key component of our solution. Our bootcamps are on web development, mobile development, data science&machine learning (artificial learning, and game development. 

Use of technology has especially been important in Covid-19 times. We switched all our in-class bootcamps to online. This switch allowed us to expand even further regions that marginalized youth can’t access to quality skills education. Also, our decentralized are already built upon technology. Youth follow our online skills development courses (such as Introduction to Computer Science) and then come together online or in person to answer questions and support each other.

The technologies that we prioritize in our bootcamps are web development, mobile development, data science & machine learning (artificial intelligence), and game development. We carefully selected these technologies based on the talent gap. Specifically for Turkey, 61% of tech companies in Turkey say that their biggest problem is the lack of qualified talent. According to the official strategy documents of the Ministry of Industry and Technology, the Turkish tech sector needs around 120,000 new programmers every year. It is important to note that there are only around 140,000 developers in Turkey. At a larger scale, it is estimated that 0.5 million developer positions are unfilled in Europe as of 2020. Finally, Gartner expects 2.3 million jobs that AI creates globally by 2020. But most of these are unfilled due to lack of talent. These numbers show the immediate need to train developers with the required skills to fill in new positions in the changing economy. 

Although this is a big problem for the economy and prosperity, these technologies open the doors for remote employment as well. So, it is possible to close the skills gaps by training youth and placing them into jobs elsewhere. We already do this - a considerable number of our employer partners are in the US. Also we recently signed a partnership with PowerCoders to place refugees from Turkey into jobs in Swiss market.

Our ToC starts with activities built upon the evidence-based findings of several studies (by the Rockefeller Foundation, Public/Private Ventures, and Heartland Alliance) that identifies four key characteristics of promising youth workforce development programs:

1)Targeting the youth who can benefit from the program the most: We identify marginalized and high-potential youth after a 3-tier application process. We select only 10% of applicants for our free-of-charge bootcamps.

2)Demand driven curriculum designed with input from industry: We shape our content based on industry demand. Also, in 2019 we conducted the most comprehensive “Technology Sector Needs Assessment” study with 250 companies in Turkey with the support of European Union. We selected our prioritized technologies based on the talent gap identified in this study.

3)Incorporating job readiness and soft life skills along with ICT skills: We combine 100-hour of technical training with 40-hour of soft skills training in each bootcamp. Youth has to complete at least 80% of this to graduate.

4)Job placement and mentorship after training: We provide mentorship during and after the bootcamp. Job placement is already embedded in our business model. Joining the Alumni Community is another essential part of peer mentorship.

Once we do all these, we achieve 65% job placement within 3 months. Our students now have a good job and increased income. Since we prioritize marginalized youth and women, their access to equal opportunities increases.

Once youth is empowered economically, they are ready to give back through the Alumni Club. Equipped with the right skills, they organize decentralized bootcamps to reach other youth online or in person who did not attend our bootcamps. This peer-to-peer learning community helps us reach thousands of more youth.

Since we succeed in showing the talent of marginalized youth, employers start questioning their stereotypes about “good school degrees” and partner with us since we provide the talent they need. Seeing this, public institutions and universities approach us to learn from our model, fund it or partner with us to integrate bootcamps within universities. This way, we are getting closer to disrupting the classical education system.

Current number of people we are serving is 3.000 people: We provided bootcamps for 200 in our first two years and 600 only in 2019, and these graduates have reached 1,500+ other youth through study groups by teaching what they have learned in our bootcamps. Then, this year until June 2020 we served 700 new students through in-class bootcamps.

In one year, we will be serving 35.300 youth: In addition to 3.000 people in our current community, we will train 1.300 people at in-class bootcamps and 30.000 through decentralized bootcamps through the decentralized CS50x bootcamps. These decentralized CS50x bootcamps are built thanks to our partnership with the Harvard University by translating their world-class Introduction to Computer Science course into Turkish.

The number will be serving in five years: We will be serving 1 million youth in 5 years by expanding into at least 5 new countries and integrate our  model into the curriculum of at least 10 universities, allowing students to receive credit from completing our content.

Within the next year, we will expand into 15 cities of Turkey to learn more about local needs and capacity. We will continue supporting bootcamps with peer to peer study groups to lay the foundation of decentralized bootcamps. We will make Harvard’s CS50x (best foundational computer science course) available online in Turkish where youth can follow by themselves easily. This blended learning model will reach 30,000 learners and 25 local study groups in its first year. The first country we will expand our model is India, in which we are in the partnership process with a respected public education institution. We will be integrating our model into their colleges that train girls from scheduled casts.

In three years, we will build an online platform with digitized versions of our bootcamps that will guide youth to join/start decentralized bootcamps in their communities. We also aim to expand into two other countries and train more than 100,000 in a year.

In five years, we aim to see Turkey as a talent hub for the technology sector and provide a decent employment pathway to any young person. Partnering with universities and high schools, to integrate our education model into theirs, will provide youth to take our demand-driven content and receive course credits from their schools. This integration will be revolutionary: It will provide flexibility to universities and will help us prepare 1 million young people every year for the evolving global economy.

As in any scaling program, the biggest challenge or barrier is keeping quality high while scaling up. The secret to our high quality is knowing the skills demand well and hiring the best programmers to become our in-class or online trainers. As we expand, a limited number of experienced programmers may be a barrier for us, especially in new geographies. If the quality drops, the number of job placements would also drop, which in turn limits our financial resources for further growth. 

Another barrier would be unwillingness of universities to integrate our model into their curriculum due to legal complexities and lack of capacity. Also, some may not like the idea of replacing their system with a more flexible skills development program. 

Finally, we may face cultural and market barriers when expanding internationally. There may be existing players that we would pose a competition, or legal issues that we need to address, or cultural barriers to development of an Alumni Community in new geographies.

Keeping quality high while scaling up and the limited number of experienced programmers: We will leverage our two competitive advantages to address this challenge. First, our Alumni Community is our best asset. Since we will have hundreds of graduates every year, the ones that have graduated years ago and gained sufficient experience in the sector would return back to us as trainers. We already experienced it this year: A female graduate from our first ever bootcamp in 2016 gained a 4-year experience in the sector as a developer and this year she became a bootcamp trainer to give back to the community! Another asset we have is strong international connections especially through our Advisory Boards. These people help us attract talent in new geographies.

Unwillingness of universities to integrate our model into their curriculum: We will prioritize the “early adapter” universities and show the impact of these partnerships to other universities. At least in Turkey, our experience showed that public institutions observe each other a lot and take initiative after seeing an example. 

Cultural and market barriers when expanding internationally: We will address this by always entering a new geography after finding the right local partner. For instance, we are currently doing this in India by partnering with a highly respectable public degree school network and implementing our program in their existing schools.

We did not select "Other".

7 full time staff: Our full time staff are divided into departments of business development, bootcamps, and community development.

4 part time staff: The part time staff include marketing and communications consultants and administrative staff members.

2 contractors: We work with two contractors mainly for resource development and grant writing.

Our team is a ‘dream team’. We combine experiences from McKinsey, Robert College, best engineering schools in the world, MIT, World Bank, and leading nonprofits such as Malala Fund. Our team was selected to the Youth Advisory Group for the World Bank’s Solutions for Youth Employment among only 16 other organizations worldwide. Our team’s success was confirmed with some of the awards we won: 

- Global Winner of the Future Skills Challenge Innovation by Ashoka and HSBC in the Most Scalable Solutions Category

- Top Three Most Promising Social Startups in Europe Award by the PricewaterhouseCoopers Social Impact Lab

- Social Entrepreneurship Award by Ashoka and Kale Group.

Our Co-Founder and CEO, Gulcan Yayla holds MBA&MSW from Washington University in St. Louis. Worked for Malala Fund and World Bank in Washington DC, and worked as a strategic planning and business development consultant before. She knows the labor market well and what it requires from the employees. Emre Sarbak, the second Co-Founder was in the founding team of LaunchCode, a US-based bootcamp organization, and has experiences in McKinsey and MIT.

Apart from our Co-Founders and Board Members, our AI Advisory Board involves the most respected entrepreneurs and researchers from the CEO of PARC XEROX to professionals from Carnegie Mellon University. Our Strategy Board and Ambassadors also include the most resourceful business leaders.

Finally, 30% of our implementation team has already graduated from our own bootcamps, so they are the most suited people to run our enterprise.

We have partnered with a wide range of organizations from public sector, tech industry and international organizations:

1. Ahiler Development Agency: This public, local development agency is responsible for five cities in Anatolia and it is managed by the Ministry of Industry and Technology of Turkey. We partnered with this agency to build the human capital capacity of five cities in the most needed technology skills. Together, we will train 300 unemployed youth in 2020 and place them into jobs. Before the skills development training, we will first conduct workshops with the government employees and the local private sector to understand local needs and tailor our content accordingly.

2. Harvard University and Prometheus: We partnered with Harvard University and Prometheus (the Coursera of Ukraine) to make CS50 (Introduction to Computer Science) course of Harvard available to all youth in Turkey online, for free, and in Turkish. We will together create a decentralized boot camp model where local study groups both learn online and meet regularly for a peer to peer learning ecosystem.

3. Microsoft: We partnered with Microsoft Turkey to provide skills development for young people in

the skills that are needed the most by Microsoft’s partner companies in Turkey. Together, we trained 300+ unemployed/underemployed youth and placed them into jobs in the Microsoft partner companies.

4. European Union (EU): We were supported by the EU in 2019 to conduct a technology sector needs assessment and organize skills development bootcamps for youth accordingly.

Our business model is bridging the gap between talent and businesses. The talent part is our beneficiaries, marginalized youth with a high potential of succeeding in the tech sector if provided with the right education. We provide free-of-charge, modular and flexible skills development bootcamps for these beneficiaries. These bootcamps are low-cost because we pay our bootcamp trainers, who are the best programmers or data scientists in the industry, hourly instead of hiring them full time. This model also allows us to attract more trainers and open new bootcamps quickly. We select beneficiaries that would benefit from our model through a 3-tier process that includes a form, a test and an interview. Upon graduation, all graduates become a member of our Alumni Club. These members then reach many more young people like themselves by leading decentralized bootcamps, which are peer-to-peer learning communities that use our world-class online programming courses to train themselves.

The business side of the equation is our paying customers. We generate income from companies looking for tech talent through job placement / bootcamp sales, or public institutions that need to invest in economic development through bootcamp sales.

Our key strategies are: 1) We stay on top of emerging trends and understand changing labour needs to equip youth with the relevant skills. 2) We foster the Alumni community to scale up a peer-based knowledge sharing system. 3) We always work with the best trainers to have the best curriculum and strategy in place.

Since we are working with the marginalized youth, we do not charge them at all. So, we generate revenue through three lines of funding streams: 

1) Job Placement Fees: Once we place our graduates into jobs, the company pays us one gross salary of the candidate. This is similar to a headhunter company’s operations.

2) Bootcamp Sales: Companies and local public institutions pay us for training the youth with the skills they need. This income is meaningful because it improves the employment chance of our graduates. For instance, we started a Startup Bootcamp Challenge this year where we invited startups to purchase our bootcamps, train new talent for the sector together, and then hire the best graduates from the bootcamps they financed. Until now three companies have partnered with us in this model. Apart from these tech companies, public institutions, especially local economic development agencies are our main customers. 

3) Kodluyoruz Enterprise: We provide training to the private sector and also public institutions to upskill their employees. 

Apart from these revenue streams, grants are another source of income.  We received grants from the International Labor Organization, Western Union Foundation, U.S. Embassy, European Union, Microsoft Philanthropies, Mozaik Foundation, EMpower Foundation. Apart from these, we have received prizes that provided us with financial support.

Our operations are financed 60% from earned revenue and 40% from grants/prizes. We aim to make ourselves 100% financially sustainable in two years.

We are applying to Solve because it will help us overcome all barriers for our growth in direct or indirect ways. 

Joining the distinguished MIT-backed network will amplify our voice and model significantly. This visibility and credibility will help us continue attracting quality human capital as we grow, addressing the first barrier we mentioned above. Being a Solver will also empower us to overcome the second barrier, which is the potential unwillingness of universities to integrate our model into their curriculum due to legal complexities and lack of capacity. All education institutions in the world respect MIT. So, being a Solver will build a trusting relationship with these institutions from the beginning. 

We also mentioned that we may face cultural and market barriers when expanding internationally. But the MIT-backed network can significantly help us reach out to the right people and organizations before taking international expansion decisions. Understanding the local context would then help us minimize the expected cultural and market barriers.

One of our main goals of partnership is to learn how to adapt our business model best to other communities. We believe that the MIT network will widen our horizon about new international opportunities and communities. Also, we would like to strengthen our revenue model by potentially meeting with tech companies or investment companies through this great network. Finally, we would learn about how to use solution technologies to a better extent and better convey our message to attract more partnerships to scale up our impact.

We would like to meet with potential partners that can help us adapt our business model to other communities and countries. Also, meeting with potential advisors or experts from technology companies would benefit us to improve the solution technologies we use. Although our operations are lean and effective after 3-year of fine-tuning, there is still room for growth to improve operational efficiency by using the right technologies. We would also appreciate learning best practices of improving revenue models and communications strategies from potential partners that we can meet through Solve.

60% of the Syrian population has been displaced. Many of them, around 3.6 million refugees, settled in Turkey.  With an additional 400,000 refugees and asylum seekers of other nationalities, the number of refugees is around 4 million in Turkey.  These refugees need financial independence to start building their lives with dignity; yet they experience high levels of unemployment, even though many are highly skilled and university qualified. This inability for highly skilled refugees to find quality employment not only constitutes an issue for the refugees, but also a huge loss of productivity and potential for the countries and sectors in question. This is all the more so in expanding and thriving industries like the technology sector, where there is already a growing shortage of IT workers and any additional talent would be a big boost. The problem is therefore how one can offer these accomplished and motivated refugees the chance to gain highly-demanded skills and find quality employment in important industries like IT, so that both the economy and refugees can benefit.

At Kodluyoruz, refugee youth is a group that we prioritize in our bootcamps. Only this year we will be training 120 refugees in web, mobile development or data science. We then place them in jobs in Turkey or remotely in other countries. For instance, we recently have partnered with PowerCoders, a Swiss organization, to place our refugee graduates in Swiss companies’ remote roles. With the support of the Andan Prize, we can increase these opportunities further.

Tech industry is a field that provides some of the most high-paying jobs but it also has a huge gender gap in employment. While representation of women in technology changes from only 9% of employees to 20% from a country to another, these numbers are very low. If we cannot ensure that women are not left behind in this growing industry, the income gap between genders will widen further in the future. 

So, at Kodluyoruz we do our best to ensure at least 40% women participation in our bootcamps. In 2019, we achieved the highest ratio - 45%. These women then are placed into high-paying jobs in tech as programmers or data scientists. We have witnessed so many life changing stories when we listen to our female graduates. Some had to stop working after having a child, some were discriminated against at the workplace, some had to stop working because of family problems. But then our bootcamps become their almost only solution to return back to employment since we provide free-of-charge and quality training to them. 

We will use the Innovation for Women Prize to improve our capacity to reach and train more women from refugee and more disadvantaged communities. Because attracting female candidates from these two communities has been challenging for us and we need to improve our capacity.

As mentioned throughout this application, our main beneficiaries are working-age, unemployed/underemployed adults (ages 18-29). We equip them with the most needed technology and soft skills to find decent employment in the tech sector. That is why, we completely fit into the criteria of the GM Prize on Good Jobs and Inclusive Entrepreneurship. 

We would use this Prize to improve our partnerships with private sector companies to accelerate the pace of our job placements.

AI is one of the fastest growing fields today. While many tasks are expected to be automated by AI, the technology is also expected to create 2.3 million jobs by 2020 (Gartner). According to PwC, “No sector is in any way immune from the impact of AI. The question is how to secure the talent, technology and access to data.” But, there is a chronic lack of talent in this new growing field. Alsp, there is an exponential increase in the data collected by the public and private sector today. AI is improving to make use of this data, and the fast pace of this new technology requires people to upskill themselves. While most professionals are engineers, upskilling all disciplines, especially media professionals and social scientists in data literacy is of the utmost importance; because they should approach data from two directions: Data can be used for evidence-based decisions to address social problems; but it should also be approached cautiously to identify fake news and other threats to society. These approaches can only be realized if all disciplines have data literacy.

To address these challenges, one of the main career pathways of Kodluyoruz is data science & machine learning. Every year we train more than 500 data scientists directly and thousands more indirectly to close the skills gap in the field. But we do not leave social scientists behind. We have recently launched a Data Science for the Public Good Program in partnership with the University of Virginia. The program trains youth from social disciplines in Turkey on data science and then works on open data of municipalities to address real social problems. 

We will use the AI for Humanity Prize to increase the diversity of AI talent around the world. Actually, we are planning to expand into India by 2021 and start our first bootcamp as a data science bootcamp for female university students from scheduled casts. If we receive the AI for Humanity Prize, the prize will definitely go towards this meaningful expansion.