Bridging the Tech Talent Gap: CEO Snehar Shah on Moringa School’s Journey to Empower African Youth

Interview with Snehar Shah, CEO at Moringa School

What is the history of Moringa School?

Moringa School was started back in 2015 by a young American lady called Audrey Cheng. She came to Kenya and realized that there was a gap in tech talent and that is why she started the tech training school. She did that using a bootcamp model. We set up our own courses and developed a curriculum that has evolved over time. We got some external funding coming in just before COVID and the company grew to a level which was beyond our founder’s skills, so I was brought in to basically take Moringa School to the next level. I actually joined the business at the end of 2021, so just after COVID. I have been focusing on building the foundations that were laid by the founder. I have focused on the scale-up of the business. One strategic pivot that we made was developing our own content but that was costly, so we developed a partnership with a leading bootcamp in the US called Flatiron School. Since I joined, we have started using their curriculum using our African tutors to deliver the training. The beauty is that our Kenyan and African students get the same level of training as students say in New York, or in the US. The difference is in the US, they would pay something like $18,000 for that course, whereas in Africa we have made it much more affordable where students pay less than 10% of that fee, at around $1,500. So that is great value for money. That is really how Moringa School got started. Our vision is to basically create opportunities for young Africans regardless of their background. We are providing tech training and leveraging tech platforms to provide training in software development, data science, and we are now diversifying in other areas of tech, including cybersecurity, which is becoming very important. And of course, keeping up with the latest evolutions in AI (artificial intelligence) as well. Even though we are calling it a school, Moringa is actually a vocational tech training institution. We are providing an alternative for tech students attending university. As you know, university courses can take three to four years and if somebody wants to work in tech, then you no longer need to pursue a university degree or a diploma. Students can come and train straight away after high school at Moringa School and within five months we provide them the relevant market-aligned skills, but also help them to get placed into jobs. We are a very mission driven organization. To date we have trained around 7,000 students and we have a 75% plus job placement rate. We also track the progression of our graduates and our alumni to show their salary progression, which is another impact metric that we are driven by.

What is your general assessment of the IT sector in Kenya and Africa?

There is a huge demand for tech talent. Despite the market volatility and the decline in funding in western markets, last year Africa still attracted a record $6.5 billion of venture capital investment. So, the startup ecosystem is quite vibrant here. Developing apps requires the talent of software developers and data scientists, so there is still a growing local demand here. To put that into context, Google did a report last year where they tried to quantify the number of software developers across the continent. For a population of more than a billion, we only have something like three-quarters of a million software developers, and in a population of more than 50 millions in Kenya, there are only about 80,000 software developers, so we are only hitting the tip of the iceberg. In terms of global demand, there is still a shortage of tech talent in some of the western markets. Previously, they were going to Eastern Europe for talent but the war in Ukraine is not helping. Some countries want Indian talent, but the salary inflation is quite high, whereas in Africa you can still find smart, affordable talent. That is really the opportunity for a company like Moringa School to be at the right place at the right time to train and churn out software developers. And now, with remote working becoming a reality post-COVID, we are finding a lot of our graduates are working out of Africa for many global US or European companies.

Do you have any success stories from your efforts in East Africa?

We celebrate small successes as we go along. As mentioned earlier, we have trained 7,000 tech talents, we have a good and growing job placement rate and in terms of the starting salary of a Moringa graduate, it is around $350 a month, which is more than double the national average minimum wage in our market. And with every year of experience that a Moringa graduate gets, the salary doubles. If you take a Moringa graduate with three years of experience, they are earning $1,200 a month on average, which is actually a good income for this part of the world. But we have the top graduates earning something like $3,000 to $5,000 a month in hard currency, which is great for contributing to the GDP of our market. To take Kenya as an example, we are now not only known for our agriculture and tourism, but Kenya is also nicknamed the ‘Silicon Savannah.’ This is where a lot of innovation has been happening. We were the place where mobile money actually came from, and tech has become quite advanced here. We have the right infrastructure in terms of the Internet and telecoms here. We have quite a progressive and supportive government for creating the right environment to support innovation and startups and with an institution like Moringa School, we are able to further the skills of Kenyan youth as we have a good basic education system. The government provides free education for primary schools and secondary schools are a good quality, so we come in to leverage on the fundamental talent that is there and provide them with the market aligned tech skills.

Are you planning to replicate your business model elsewhere?

We are continuing to grow in Kenya with our flagship courses where there is still a huge way to go. We are also diversifying our course offerings to keep up with market trends. Cybersecurity has become quite important, so we have some expert courses on that, and we are going to be launching a bootcamp on cybersecurity. UI/UX product design is another bootcamp that we have launched and with the demand for AI growing at an exponential pace, we will soon be launching some training on AI and looking to take the leadership in that. But also, Africa is a big continent, and we want to replicate our success in Kenya to become a market leader in other countries. Last year, we attempted some pilots in Ghana and Nigeria, but the environment was quite tough with the Forex crisis in those markets. We also saw that the affordability of the students in those markets seems to be lower than what we see here in Kenya so we are looking to see how we can adapt our business model to that. We are actively in discussions with some donor funding partners who can come in and help capitalize the market by subsidizing our training. We are looking at some other innovative financing models. We are filling a cohort in Nigeria using an income sharing model where the students only pay 10% of the fees up front and the rest of the fees are deferred to when the students get placed into jobs. Once they get a job, the students are obliged to pay a certain percentage of their monthly salary back to the financier for the fees. So yes, we are currently innovating and experimenting with different business models to further expand into other markets on the continent.

Where would you like to see Moringa School in the next three to five years?

Our big, audacious goal is by the year 2030 to have contributed to the development of something like 200,000 knowledge workers across the continent. We are positioning Moringa beyond training to more sort of a training plus organization where we don’t only do the training, but we also extend the customer lifetime value with our students in terms of finding them the right job opportunities. Employers typically want experienced talent and what we are producing is still a bit fresh and we need to bridge that gap, so we are innovating a lot in different internship models, and we are able to scale on that. We are also developing a community platform for our students and alumni which we are calling Moringa World. It is a mini-LinkedIn for our tech talent. We want to be able to onboard the talent to that platform. We want to be able to vet the skills of the talent. We want to be able to identify the gaps and then we can upskill the talent using e-learning and the tech tools. We also want to do the matchmaking of our graduates to employers. We are really leveraging a lot of tech in our journey. In the medium term, we really want to make sure that Moringa is a value adding organization, not only for the skilling, but also in terms of talent development and talent matching as well.

Our first investor was a Dutch venture capital fund called DOB Equity. We did some follow-up investment rounds where Proparco came in. We would be looking to do some further fundraising probably sometime next year where we would hope Proparco would continue the funding and bring other external investors based on the track record that we are building. Also, if we have some unique opportunities in other markets, then on a case-by-case basis we would look at approaching existing investors like Proparco. Those are some of our equity funders, but we also attracted $10 million of donor funding from Mastercard Foundation a couple of years ago and we will use that funding to invest in our tech development for tech platforms. Before COVID, we used to be a bricks and mortar training organization, but since investing in our tech platform, we are now making access to our programs available, regardless of geography or background. Currently around 70% of our training is done fully remotely and that is what enables us to expand across other markets. Mastercard has been funding scholarships as well for the unaffording students and so far, we have taken around 2,500 students through that Mastercard Foundation program. There is a strong appetite for good education companies who are making an impact across Africa, and I am quite proud to say that Moringa School is one of them.

What inspires you to do what you do?

I was born here in Kenya, actually I come from the Rift Valley. When I was young, my parents relocated to the UK, so I did my studies and spent half my life in the UK. I was working for the French telecom company Orange and when they bought an operation in Kenya, I got an opportunity to move back here 15 years ago. I was with them for five years after which I ended my corporate career and got into the world of startups. Moringa is my third startup, the last one being in the renewable energy space, where I was running a company called Azuri. I grew that business from scratch to having powered something like 300,000 households across five countries in Africa for lighting. In the later part of my career, I have got into the world of social impact and that is what really inspires me and drives me to run a for-profit business but with a very social mission, whether it is in renewable energy or now in education. Two years ago, I was invited to join an institution called YPO, which stands for Young Presidents Organization. It is one of the most powerful organizations in the world with a membership of around 30,000 CEOs and business owners. If we add up the numbers on a joint basis, YPO companies are employing millions of people across the world and our combined revenues are into the billions, if not touching the trillions of dollars. YPO is not really a networking organization, but it teaches one lifelong learning so that is something that really drives me. It is an organization that I give back to a lot, but I get a lot of value out of.

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