When Tolulope Komolafe first heard the pitch, she was skeptical. A fledgling company in Lagos, Nigeria, would pay her to learn how to write modern computer code and then offer her a good job in the high-tech economy.
“I thought it was a con,” she recalled. “Too good to be true.”
From New York Times. Story by
After inquiring, Komolafe found the offer was real. Today, she is a software developer, working remotely from Lagos for a start-up in New York, and she dreams of starting her own tech company someday.
Komolafe, a 27-year-old Nigerian, is one of hundreds of young Africans who have joined Andela, a fast-growing start-up based in New York that has attracted the attention and money of people like the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and works with blue-chip companies like Mastercard.
The company’s ambitious agenda spans education, economic development and moneymaking. It is betting on its ability to build out a talent pipeline of African software developers to the United States and elsewhere, tapping into a continent eager to connect to the global digital economy.
Read more at New York Times.