Nsesa Foundation

The funding from the prize will enable me to fund the next step of our work such as hiring software developers to build and improve our platform and enable us to scale our impact to millions of Africans, teaching them to code using their smartphones and improving their economic and career prospects.

Nsesa Foundation is an education nonprofit in Ghana that trains young Africans with technology and engineering skills. Our main programs are Project iSWEST and SuaCode. Project iSWEST is a 3-week intensive in-person innovation boot camp in Ghana where high school students are trained in the innovation process from problem identification to prototyping solutions and building technology and engineering solutions. SuaCode is a pan-African online smartphone-based coding course that teaches young Africans how to code using smartphones and AI, with a goal to teach millions across Africa to code.

Africa is home to the largest and youngest workforce in the world but many companies struggle to fill IT-related positions. Almost 16 million young Africans, around 13.4% of the total labor force of 15-24-year-olds, are facing unemployment. Less than 1% of African children leave school with basic coding skills. One major cause is poor access to computers. Nonetheless, there is a proliferation of smartphones in Africa with a projection of 929.9 million smartphones by 2021. Hence, smartphones provide a unique means to provide coding education to Africans.

Nsesa Foundation's SuaCode is a smartphone-based online coding course that aims to teach millions across Africa how to code by exploiting the proliferation and untapped capabilities of smartphones. SuaCode provides lesson notes in English and French, fun coding exercises, quizzes and assignments, and an online platform to ask questions and receive answers from other students, facilitators, and our bilingual AI teaching assistant, Kwame. Kwame answers students' coding questions and predicts which students are likely to drop out at various points in the course. AutoGrad, our automated grading system grades the assignments and provides individualized feedback. Students that complete the course get certificates and mentoring by African Software Engineers at tech companies like Google.

Our use of smartphones and AI makes us unique, accessible, and scalable. More Africans have smartphones than computers and by using smartphones, we are using what is easily accessible to empower young Africans. Our AI teaching assistant, Kwame, (named after Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president) answers students’ coding questions anytime and helps students exactly when they need it, making us scalable. Finally, our course materials are in English and French which covers almost all of the 54 African countries that have language as an official language. We are pioneers of smartphone coding education in Africa and SuaCode is the most accessible and scalable solution to Africa’s digital literacy problem. We have 5 peer-reviewed papers on our  SuaCode work publised by IEEE and ACM, prestigious engineering and computer science societies, NeurIPS 2020 (top AI conference), and the AI in Education 2021 conference. Our work has been awarded with the 2019 Education Innovation Prize by the African Union, 2021 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation Shortlist by the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering (2021), and 2021 MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 Semi-finalist: https://www.raeng.org.uk/news/news-releases/2021/february/academy-recognises-the-entrepreneurial-innovators

SuaCode has had over 2,000 learners from across the globe: 5 continents, 69 countries (42 in Africa), 600+ cities apply to learn to code with us with completion rates up to 76% which is above the industry standard of less than 10%. Our alums have gotten jobs and internships and several are studying computer science and engineering in top universities such as MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia etc. We improving the economic and career prospects of young Africans. To scale to millions, we building our own platform to host our course (we currently host the course on a number of different platforms) and creating more courses like AI courses.