Ustacky

The Problem: As more companies, institutions and governments adopt digital/IT solutions, there is a growing demand for IT/tech professionals and by 2030, it is expected that there will be a global shortage of more than 85 million tech professionals. However, with this increasing demand, very few Africans are getting these tech jobs.

The Solution: Ustacky has created an ed-tech platform (ustacky.com) that provides on-demand, self-paced quality tech education to Africans (especially the Youth) who want to start or improve their career in software development, data science, UI/UX design e.t.c so that they can compete for world-class tech jobs.

The Impact: As we scale and more students enrol, graduate from our courses (Microdegrees) and also get jobs, we will be helping to reduce youth unemployment in Africa, increase Africa’s GDP and consequently help to reduce the global shortage of tech professionals.

In 2020, the world was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic which forced a lot of organizations, businesses and even governments to rethink the way they carry out their operations. They were made to join the already increasing number of institutions that now rely on IT/tech solutions. (See here). 

With this, there has been an increase in the number of tech professionals (software developers, data scientists e.t.c) needed across the world adding to the demand for the already scarce supply of qualified tech professionals (See here).

Unfortunately, a lot of Africans cannot fill these available positions due to a lack of access to quality tech education.

To understand this more clearly, there are 23.9 million developers in the world but only about 700 thousand of them are Africans (See here). That is less than 3% of the entire global developer population.

So, Ustacky is trying to solve key problems making access to quality tech education difficult for Africans. Problems such as: 

1. Lack of quality tech learning resources 2. Learning platforms that are not flexible enough

3. Learning resources or platforms that are not targeted towards solving problems peculiar to Africans

4. Very expensive learning resources and platforms.

Our solution is an on-demand self-paced training that uses high-quality instructor-led video courses called Microdegrees available to students both online and offline to help them start or improve their career in IT/tech all at an affordable price.

Each microdegree also has quizzes and coding assessments to establish concepts learnt, discussion forums for collaboration amongst students, mentorship e.t.c.

To use our platform, a student simply accesses the platform through our website or mobile app (more than 70% of every Microdegree can be followed and practised on our mobile app), enrols in any Microdegree and starts watching the video courses.

Also taking into account the poor internet penetration in Africa (though it’s getting better), a user that has limited or poor access to the internet can still access our video courses by getting a Ustacky course dongle that has the courses in the enrolled Microdegree preloaded for offline access.

After going through the courses, the student is assigned a real-life capstone project to ascertain the skills acquired from the Microdegree. Once the project has been reviewed and the student passed, he/she will undergo a career guide and resume review after which is graduation. Then the student is job-ready.

Our primary targets are African Youth who want to transition into tech or those already in tech but willing to improve their tech skills with Nigeria being the first country of focus. The advent of Covid 19 led millions of Nigerians to become jobless or underemployed. One survey suggests 80% of Nigerian households have their income reduced; the youth were severely affected. Even before the pandemic, Youth unemployment in Africa was very high. Of Africa's nearly 420 million youth, one-third are unemployed and discouraged, another third are vulnerably employed, and only one in six is in wage employment.

We have partnered with organizations like Data Science Nigeria and Wennovation Hub in order to reach out to students faster, understand their needs and also provide job opportunities for them. 

Recently, we just secured another partnership with the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund, to train 20,000 Lagos Residents in Introduction to Programming. This would enable us to establish engagement with students and introduce them to IT through the introductory training after which they can now apply for Microdegrees that will make them job-ready

Furthermore, getting more students and job partners through the partnerships we have, enables us to get feedback on our products and services. This helps in shaping how we tailor our solutions to become better.

Our mentorship system, discussion forums and social media platforms are also very key channels with which we engage students and non-students on how we can offer them the best tech education possible at affordable pricing.

With our quality and affordable Microdegrees that can be accessed online and offline, on PC or mobile phone, African Youth can now finally access tech education with the required IT/digital skills to become job-ready without hassle.

It is also important to note that all our courses can be easily adapted into any language as this would help remove the language barrier that could hinder smooth learning.

Living in Africa means you are denied access to good and quality tech education due to poor curriculum, poor digital infrastructure and expensive education. Our affordable on-demand video learning platform will improve drastically access to quality tech/digital education as more Africans will be able to afford our courses.

Moreso, with the provision of course dongles for offline access and the ability to adapt our courses to any language, Africans from any part of Africa (rural or urban) can become fully equipped with enough digital skills to be able to participate in the digital economy.

Ustacky is currently at the growth stage because we have tested our product with early pilot users in late 2020. However, in January of 2021, we fully launched in Nigeria we now have 3 corporate partners, 3,500 students, almost 2400 active subscriptions and about 200 students have completed all courses in their Microdegrees. 

Presently, we are looking to increase these numbers to 25,000 or more active/successful subscriptions by the end of 2021and over 5,000 job-ready graduates.

This solution is innovative because:

1. We would be providing quality video training to 100,000 Africans for free.

2. Our courses can be accessed on the web (www.ustacky.com ) and even on smartphones (through our mobile app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.mvp.ustacky&hl=en&gl=US ), a key advantage in case of epileptic electricity and lack of access to a personal computer.

3. By providing course dongles loaded with our videos, Africans with limited or no access to the internet would be able to access our training.

4. Our courses would also be easily adapted to other languages asides from English such as Arabic, French e.t.c

5. We not only provide training to our students but also give them challenges (quizzes, coding assessments, real-world projects), support (mentorship), guidance(career guide) and even a platform (our jobs portal) to get world-class jobs in their chosen career path.

Currently, we have about 4,000 registered users with about 1,000 active students. With these students, we hope to have about 500 graduates.

One year from now: we will have more students from other African countries like South Africa, Kenya and Ghana which means we will have about  30,000 students

Five Years from now: We will be in many African countries serving more than 200,000 active students

We will measure our impact by the number of graduates from Ustacky that have landed tech jobs in Africa, Europe, North America and any other place with an average monthly salary of  $1,000.

Full-time: 5

Part-time: 5

Contract Staffs: 1

The team at Ustacky is made up of Senior software developers and data scientists from top tech companies (Checkout.com, Delivery Hero, General Electric et.c) with decades of experience in teaching IT skills to students both offline and online. Ustacky founders have before now created courses on platforms like Udemy with over 2000 students. Also, the team is made up of software developers and data scientists with professional experience in mentorship and code review. Therefore, we are a team of IT professionals with the knowledge and passion required to tackle this problem of access to quality IT/tech education.

We are applying to MIT Solve in other to get the funding (through the grant) and support (through MIT Solve's network) in order to overcome barriers we are facing such as getting more students on board, getting more business partners, getting a partnership with Universities for certificate recognition and getting partners to provide jobs to our graduates.

Over the past several years, tech professionals from developed countries have had the opportunity to access world-class jobs due to their easy access to quality tech education while Africans have been excluded from the race.

However, with our solution, we are bringing opportunities to third world countries and developing nations (in Africa) such that they can also have access to quality tech education and compete for the benefits available globally such as word-class tech jobs. 

What this means is that a young person from a remote town in Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi or any other African country can compete with any tech professional from San Francisco in the U.S.A.

Our solution gives access to quality tech education through our on-demand self-paced video that can be accessed anywhere at any time. It gives women and girls easy access to tech education such that they can attain digital literacy enough to become financially independent without obstruction from any cultutral or societal hindrance that are usually inhibitors to girl education.