The rising unemployment in Africa is increasingly becoming a source of concern, with a 2021 Bloomberg report revealing that Africa holds the top three spots of 82 countries with the highest unemployment rate in the world. Nigeria occupies the third spot at 33.3%.
Meanwhile Africa’s digital economy continues to grow, with record-breaking funding and an all-time rise in the global demand for its tech talent according to Google’s Africa Developer Ecosystem 2021 Report. This growth is so impressive that 4 out of 10 African software developers are employed by one company outside Africa while 5 out of 10 work for African start-ups.
This irony of rising unemployment rates among African youths despite the high demand for African tech talents across the globe brought Ebenezer Anjorin, Efe Amadasun, and Kunle Adedayo together to start Betterchalk. Having had the opportunity to build tech products for tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, IBM and Workday, they began exploring ways to build a platform that will empower Africans with relevant tech skills to better their economic reality.
Betterchalk is a platform for authoring and delivering high-quality, practical and in-demand technical courses. The company is on a mission to democratize access to tech education and empower motivated African youths by offering world-class learning experiences at affordable prices and providing best-in-class e-learning technology to partners in the ecosystem.
Betterchalk launched publicly in May 2022 following insights from a one-year pilot during the height of the pandemic. The pilot trained 500 learners across Nigeria with 20% female representation, a completion rate of 75%, and 9 out of 10 learners saying they preferred Betterchalk to other learning platforms in the market. The response comes as no shock when you consider that the Betterchalk platform does stand out from the other edtech platforms in some ways which include:
- Flexibility: Betterchalk gives learners the framework and assistance they need to learn at their own pace while tracking their progress through the courses and sending them progress reports. All that is required is a computer and an internet connection.
- Real-life relevance: To ensure that learners have employable, in-demand skills, they are trained using practical and real-life scenarios and industry-standard technologies as examples and projects.
- Interactive and zero setup: The platform has integrated tooling for learners to try out their newly acquired skills. As they move through the course, learners can use auto-graded assessments to test their understanding by working through a problem and receiving feedback.
- Social learning: Learning on Betterchalk is built around their Discord community where learners can interact with instructors and their peers to easily get assistance. They’ve developed bots that help facilitate a seamless experience between the community and the learning platform. The Betterchalk community also provides a place for tech enthusiasts of all skill levels, from beginners to experts to network, discover opportunities and have fun.
- Quality support: One of the issues Betterchalk set out to solve is providing quality support to learners. Help is integrated and contextual, tailored to the task at hand, and with the community, learners can be assured of assistance when needed.
The Betterchalk platform currently has five courses and one learning path with prices as low as ₦25,000 ($40), and free courses and discounts offered from time to time as more courses and learning paths continue to launch. A course teaches a specific tech skill while a learning path is a combination of multiple courses in a structured manner such that when a student completes the learning path, they can get a job. Prospective learners are not required to have prior technical knowledge as courses are structured from beginner up to professional level.
The newly-launched Frontend Web Development learning path provides a perfect opportunity for anyone to grow the skills needed to become a frontend web developer.
The learning path consists of these five courses:
- Introduction to Linux Command Line (FREE course)
- Introduction to Programming with Javascript
- Building Websites with HTML and CSS
- Client-side Web Development with JavaScript
- Web Development with React
Many users that have gone through Betterchalk have gone on to get full-time jobs at different companies. A great example is Gbenga Omowole who started looking to transition from the medical field to tech. After completing his program on Betterchalk, he secured a full-time position as a full-stack engineer at Vault Hill, a blockchain-based company creating an ecosystem of a human-centric metaverse.
Bolaji Muili had a dream to kick off a career in tech. He signed up on Betterchalk to equip himself with the necessary skills and after undergoing seven months of the fullstack web developer training at Betterchalk, he joined the product and engineering team at Titan Trust Bank.
“Betterchalk offers a unique learning model that is fully practical and the support is unbelievable. I received a solid foundation to kickstart my career in tech, and now I work with a multinational company,” Michael Isesele, another beneficiary of the Betterchalk platform revealed.
Do you hope to share a similar success story in future? Sign up at Betterchalk today.
