Andela, a technology training and job placement firm, which set up shop in Rwanda this year, has appointed former Irembo chief executive Clément Uwajeneza as its country director.
Uwajeneza, who left Irembo about two months ago, is expected to provide strategic leadership and direction to the Kigali Andela office, and will be responsible for its programmatic and operational management.
The firm in July signed an agreement with government to recruit up to 500 Rwandans with expertise in software development and offer them six months paid training. This will be done over a period spanning five years.
Trainees will receive over 900 skill checkpoints enabling them to be competitive across the world.
Thereafter, Andela will offer the new trainees jobs as remote members of software development teams at world leading firms. Andela works with over 150 firms spread across 45 cities globally.
Seni Sulyman, Andela’s Vice President of Global Operations, said that Uwajeneza will bring rich experience from his time in the local ICT sector which will further drive the firm.
"Uwajeneza joins Andela with a strong track record as a business leader and contributor to Rwanda’s ICT sector, as well as an ability to effectively engage a range of stakeholders. This will be essential in driving Andela’s growth in the region. We are very excited to have Clément Uwajeneza lead our first pan-African hub,” he said.
On his part, Uwajeneza said that he is keen to work at the firm in bid to deliver national goals such as driving towards a knowledge based economy, exporting knowledge through BPO and becoming an African technology hub.
"We have been aiming at creating employment for highly skilled technology practitioners within the Rwanda tech-ecosystem and Andela has figured out how to do this fast and at scale. Our ambition for Rwanda is to develop and employ more than 500 software developers within the next five years. The success of Andela pan-African hub in Rwanda will considerably contribute to at least 3 key areas of the Rwanda’s economic transformation plan towards a knowledge based economy: exporting knowledge through BPO; becoming an African technology hub; and advancing technology entrepreneurship,” said Uwajeneza.
In the training phase of the 500 software developers, the firm said that they expect to incur between $15,000 and $20,000 each, raising its market entry outlay to between $7.5 million and to $10 million.
Andela makes money by charging clients (the international firms in which it places the software developers) per workers placed in the respective firms.
The firm collects the proceeds, pays the developers about a third of the amount with the rest serving as their revenue.
However, the firm maintains that the salary of the developers is way higher than the average pay in most countries.
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