African Leadership International (ALI) announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Silicon Valley based Holberton Inc., a Silicon Valley-founded, project-based, college alternative educating the next generation of software engineers.
According to Fred Swaniker of African Leadership International in a LinkedIn post, “Once complete, this acquisition will give ALI ownership of the advanced technology program that will enable us to provide global organizations access to significant untapped pools of talent that can bridge the growing global shortage of technology talent.”
“It will also change the lives of millions of young Africans by equipping them with the software engineering skills essential for the future digital workplace. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the third quarter. As part of the transaction, the Holberton School network will be separated as an independent organization, ” he added.
Holberton Inc offers a truly revolutionary software engineering training program that was launched in 2016 in San Francisco by Julien Barbier and his team. Their vision extended beyond creating just another 3-month coding bootcamp. They wanted to create a deeper program where students would code for 70-100 hours/week for up to 24 months. More like a Computer Science degree, the training program would cover low-level programming, algorithms, high-level programming, and systems engineering. It would then go into more advanced topics like machine learning, data science, and augmented and virtual reality.
As a result of their program’s rigor, Holberton graduates in Silicon Valley have been hired by companies like Apple, Google, Tesla, LinkedIn, Docker, Dropbox, Pinterest, Rappi, and Nvidia. Holberton’s in-house data also shows that their Silicon Valley graduates earn more than computer science graduates from Stanford, Yale, and Caltech.
“Four years ago – even before the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation – we formed the view that the world needed skills to power the fourth industrial revolution. So we launched ALX to train talent in full stack software engineering, data science, UX design, cloud computing, cyber security, product management, AR/VR and other technology fields to bridge the impending global technology talent shortage.”
“We saw Africa as uniquely positioned to solve the world’s shortage of technology talent. Traditional sources of tech talent – China, India, and the West – are aging and shrinking. In contrast, Africa’s population, with an average age of 19, is the youngest in the world. The continent will have a workforce larger than China and India’s by 2035, and will make up 40% of the entire world’s population by the end of the century. Yet, of the 26.5 million developers in the world in 2021, only 700,000 of them were African (according to the Google Africa Developer Report, 2021). “
“This is where Holberton came in. We began our partnership with Holberton Inc. in 2020, and went from an initial enrollment of less than 50 students to almost 100,000 today. That’s growth of over 2000x since the first cohort! Below is a chart of our trajectory so far and a map of where our students are located.”
