Ingressive for Good upskills 5,000+ African youths in tech in partnership with Coursera

Ingressive for Good has partnered with Coursera to offer scholarships to 5,000+ African youths in tech as part of its commitment to upskill and increase the earning power of youths.

The partnership is part of Coursera’s global roll-out of the Workforce Recovery Initiative, where any state and country can provide their citizens with free access to online learning. This builds solidly on Ingressive for Good (I4G) goal to train one million African youths in tech for free and bridge the tech skills and opportunities gap in Africa.

The program aims to develop high-demand skills in areas like personal development, technology, and career development. It includes access to highly sought-after professional certificates like the Google IT Support Professional Certificate designed to train people with no tech background for IT jobs.

In this report by Payscale, a tech employee earns 2x more salary than their peer in a non-tech role. However, access to tech, tech training, and resources are expensive. This discovery led I4G to find ways to make tech training accessible for free to African youths and place them in jobs.

The response to this opportunity is proof that there's a big need for access to tech training. Over 20,000 African youths applied in less than one month.  So far, over 5,000 young people have been trained over a six-week period with access to 4,000+ courses from leading universities such as Yale, Michigan, and Stanford, as well as industry leaders such as Google and IBM.

Blessing Abeng, the Director of Communications at Ingressive For Good, said, "In less than two months, there have been over 24,793 enrollments, 43,014 learning hours spent, 46,047 lessons taken, and over 100 people placed in jobs. We've had so many success stories and the response is really wonderful".

Beneficiaries of the I4G Coursera programme share their story

Stephen Michael was looking for ways to improve himself and upskill but COVID interrupted his plans. During the lockdown, he searched for online courses and most of them cost over $300. Then he came across Ingressive For Good (I4G), a non-profit equipping young Africans in need with tech skills to help them impact and contribute to the development of Africa, socially and economically.

At this time, I4G had partnered with Coursera, the world’s leading online learning platform to offer scholarships to 5000+ African youths in tech. He took advantage of it and some of the $300+ courses were available for free. After one month of learning and practicing, he landed his first big client and the experience changed his life forever. He shared the opportunity with his sister and in less than 2 weeks, she was building functioning landing pages.

"Coursera is honored to support I4G in its commitment to upskill African youth", said Anthony Tattersall, Vice President EMEA at Coursera. "Through access to high-quality online learning, young people will be able to gain the critical skills needed to swiftly enter the workforce, as well as explore new careers in technology".

This partnership has impacted young people living in Sub-saharan Africa and allow them have access to courses worth thousands of dollars for free. You too can benefit from other Ingressive For Good opportunities by joining the I4G Network of over 17,000 tech enthusiasts across 55 cities across Africa.

About Ingressive For Good

Ingressive For Good (I4G) is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating and increasing the earning power of African youth through tech training and resources.

Find out more about Ingressive For Good here. Follow @ingressive4good on social media. Detailed Statistics about the I4G Coursera programme are available here.