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The software includes course materials in English and French, quizzes and coding assignments, an automated grading system and an artificial intelligence teaching assistant called Kwame, after Ghana’s first president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah. The app hosts monthly online coding courses for individuals and is also offered to schools and organisations who wish to enrol their students or employees in their own ‘SuaCode Classroom’.  

In 2018, after five years running a non-profit organisation which offered a three-week innovation bootcamp, computer scientist and engineer George Boateng realised that only 25% of his students had access to laptops, while 100% owned smartphones. Boateng and his team modified the coding course and reintroduced it using smartphones. Boateng’s students were able to develop complex applications and he saw an opportunity to upscale the bootcamp into a learning tool to reach aspiring coders across the continent.

Statistics show that fewer than 1% of African children leave school with basic coding skills, which is why many African government institutions and private companies are struggling to fill IT-related positions, despite the continent being home to the largest and youngest workforce in the world.

SuaCode.ai undertook four pilot studies between 2018 and 2020, receiving more than 3,000 applications for its introductory course from 69 countries across five continents, with 42 of them in Africa. As the company continues to grow, their goal is to enrol more than 10,000 students per month across all 54 African countries in 2021. SuaCode.ai’s courses are structured in a cohort-based format, meeting the students’ needs for support and interaction. Their course completion rate is 76%, compared to the industry standard of 10%.

“SuaCode.ai aims to increase the coding completion rate, while also creating job opportunities. Our target market is the 28.6 million smartphone-owning students in Africa, but the courses are open to everyone who wants to broaden their software development abilities.”

George Boateng, SuaCode.ai