Audrey Cheng

Empowering the next IT generation

To Audrey Cheng, age is just a number. A few months after moving from the US to Kenya aged 20 to join a venture capitalist firm investing in startups in Sub-Saharan Africa, Audrey founded Moringa School following what she calls a ‘light bulb’ moment.

Through her work at the venture capitalist firm, Audrey quickly realised that most high-caliber experts in the Kenyan technology sector were self-taught, while many IT graduates from tertiary institutions and universities remained unemployed for lack of practical IT skills. Undertaking her own research in to why this was the case, Audrey learned from The International Labour Organization that within Kenya, 40% of college graduates are unable to find employment and only 1% of Computer Science majors can secure positions in their field of study, because universities and other educational training programmes deliver outdated, theoretical content that does not match the needs of companies.

That light bulb moment came when she decided to “set up an outcome-based school to impart practical skills required within the industry to IT graduates and students fresh from secondary schools.”

A market-driven curriculum

Audrey visited several IT schools and companies to set up a comprehensive curriculum, then using her savings, founded Moringa School in Nairobi in 2014, with the mission of making people immediately employable in high-value jobs.

Through a market and outcome-driven programme, an effective practical teaching model and a partnership with Hack Reactor (a top Silicon Valley coding school), Moringa School is contributing to the creation of world-class developers in Africa, who are also competitive globally.

The school has placed more than 95% of its graduates in leading companies throughout Africa and the world. In addition to Kenya, Moringa School has offered its curriculum in other regions including Pakistan, through partnerships with the World Bank and Pakistani government, Accelerate Institution in Hong Kong, and Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology in Ghana.

Making a contribution and learning from it

However Moringa School’s real added value is making its graduates sustainably valuable: “The really exciting part of Moringa School is not just that our graduates get their first job, but that they double their salary within months to a year after enrolling in our programme. We teach them how to learn so that they will be successful no matter what job or position they are in,” explains Audrey, who is currently working on expanding Moringa School to Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa this year.

All this at 24? “I’d rather spend my youth on something that really matters and that I can contribute to and learn from.”