PRESS RELEASE: Econet’s Muzinda Hub to train 1 million developers in Africa by 2022

Econet wireless’s Muzinda Hub has signed an all Africa exclusive agreement with Treehouse, the number one global online training platform for coding. Treehouse offers a variety of programming languages and is also a Google certified training partner for Android app development. The partnership will see Muzinda Hub set training targets of 200 thousand developers a year as it expands beyond Zimbabwe to the rest of Africa through a purely online and device agnostic model. Muzinda Hub has been very sucessful with its Zimbabwean operation showing a 75% completion rate from students on its programs. Of the 1,500 graduates to date, 70% of the developers have been placed in freelancing opportunities where they are earning an average of US$500 per month.

According to Tendai Mashingaidze, the CEO of Econet Education ‘ The partnership with Treehouse is a strategic initiative to significantly scale our efforts to deliver top class training content that will produce quality developers in Africa. At the same time Econet’s position as a Telecom, Media & Technology (TMT) company allows us to introduce clever ways to not only reach African youth but also overcome some of the infrastructural challenges associated with online learning in Africa”

Founded in 2014, Muzinda Hub aims to combat youth unemployment and also to empower young Africans with a globally relevant skills set that could earn them a decent income tapping into opportunites in the digital economy.  According to Mashingaidze  “As more Africans come online, small business in Africa is beginning to realise the need to catch-up on its digitisation efforts and we want to position Muzinda Hub as a developer talent pipeline that can fast track these digitisation efforts. We are running a very successful model in Zimbabwe where we have seen the appetite that youths have to learn to code and the absorption of this talent by the private and public sector has been encouraging. There is no reason why African youth should be unemployed when they can upskill themselves to help close to 80% of small businesses in Africa who do not have an online presence.’

As Muzinda Hub continues to grow and use technology as the catalyst in creating job opportunities and up-skilling young Africans, we look on with eager anticipation to the continued impact its programmes, graduates, products and services will have on Africa’s digital, social and commercial landscape.