Last week at Tumaini Gardens in Kajiado, Memusi Hope Foundation held a graduation ceremony for 21 graduands who had just concluded an intensive five-week training in software development. The 21 young men and women are drawn from different areas of Kajiado Central constituency and were converging at the Kajiado CDF offices every weekday from 8am to 5pm.
This training program whose end game is to improve employability for the beneficiaries came to be in August of this year and is a joint effort between the foundation and Moringa School. Other sponsors/ partners include Huawei Technologies Kenya, Ostatech Limited and Santos Okotta (Grant Consultant) and Kenya National Information Centre (KENIC). The partners will be expected to work towards at least 80% job placement of the graduates with The Memusi Hope Foundation taking lead on this.
During the 5-week program, Moringa School was in charge of covering tuition fee, providing technical expertise and laptops for all the students, providing transport stipends for all the students during the training period, and organizing for a Technical Mentor Apprentice/Graduate Volunteer to support students in person twice a week.
We caught up with some key players in the program and here is what they had to say:
Kevin Irungu
Kevin is an alumni of Moringa school where he graduated in May after a 6 month course. He works as a remote software developer based in Kitengela and is a volunteer technical mentor for this program dubbed Entaisere é Kenya. He sees massive employment opportunities for software developers in institutions like banks, telcos, the technology industry and Government to name a few. For anyone wishing to get into this industry, his advice for them is to have passion, lots of patience and be able to work in a team.
Mary Meoli
24-year-old Mary Meoli from Ngatataek area is a beneficiary of the training. So fascinated is she by coding that she would love to go into the next stages in the software development course and even go further ahead and make it a career. Ngatataek is around 35km from Kajiado and for the first 3 weeks of her studies she was commuting daily before deciding to stay with a relative closer to town. None of these challenges dimmed her spirits though and she’s glad to have come as far as graduating. Her parents are excited for her, and she has their blessings to try new horizons.
William Mwangi
25-year-old William Mwangi is a DJ based in Kajiado town, and also a beneficiary of the Entaisere é Kenya program. Given a chance, he would love to go ahead a become a full developer and he is motivated by the beginnings that Moringa school have offered him. His parents are fully supportive and the general hope in the family is that he will be able to go that far. To those who are thinking about taking this path, he says “Go for it. Nothing is difficult, just unfamiliar”.
Steve Suchi
We also got to speak to Steve Suchi for a deep dive of the training program. Steve is the Director of Marketing and Admissions at Moringa School which helps learners to build new career possibilities with confidence and capability. In a partnership with Mastercard Foundation, Moringa School plans to have as many people as possible employable, especially women and people from marginalized communities. Through the Access Program, the school has been running scholarships for around 4 years now with 75% job placement success and 25% entrepreneurship success.
The idea of coding morans was born at the Connected Kenya event and it is great to see it come to fruition. The graduation on Friday only marks the end of Phase 1, otherwise the whole curriculum should run for 6 months after which the students will be full software developers. For people who started from being as green as never having touched a computer to being able to code using highly skilled languages like Java and Python in just five weeks, it is clearly predictable how skilled a further 5 months of intensive training will make them.
