From Taiwan to US to Kenya with tech

From Taiwan to America and finally to Kenya, Audrey Cheng, 26, is a perfect trifecta of passion, grit and humility.

Audrey is the CEO and founder of Moringa School, a multi-disciplinary coding school committed to bridging the skills gap in the country’s job market by offering its students the necessary technical and professional training required in the current digital economy.

Even though she graduated with a degree in journalism and global health from Northwestern University, Chicago, education and technology have always been close to her heart.

“I first got involved in teaching when I was in high school. I had a class of 70 students in Taiwan who I taught English. It was a very challenging experience and it made me start thinking about how to deliver quality education in an engaging way to such a large number of students. In university, I taught a group of privileged students on robotics,” she says.

“I was also a tutor in Southside Chicago which is a dangerous, low income and violent side of Chicago. From my teaching experience, I realised that where a student came from is actually what inhibits his or her access to quality education,” adds Audrey.

After her college education, she came to Kenya in 2014 working for Savannah Fund, a firm that invested in start-up companies in Africa.

Her job was to help accelerate these companies’ growth.

“I was excited to work for Savannah Fund as they were empowering local entrepreneurs who I believe drive economic growth in any country. However, when working with the start-ups, I realised something was amiss,” she explains.

“The companies I was working with at the time even though being local, were outsourcing their tech work from India. That made me question them. The essence of creating a company is creating jobs for people in the country. Why then would you give these jobs to people outside Kenya? Upon talking to them, I realised they were not the problem. Even though the companies were desperately looking for people to employ, there was an inadequate number of people with the right skills in the country.”

Upon making her discovery, she decided to find the root cause of the skills gap problem in the country.

“I visited several universities and technology training programmes in the country to see how they were teaching skills such as software development. I found that the classes were outdated and very theoretical in nature. In one class, students were being taught how to programme by writing codes on pieces of paper. That is clearly a terrible thing” she says.

At just 21 at the time, she knew what had to be done. She was going to start a school that offered these skills to promising young people. At that time, she did not have savings and so she went back to America where she worked for a company in Silicon Valley.

After working for just three months, she managed to save enough money that would enable her run Moringa School.

In April 2014, Moringa School opened its doors to its first students.

“What is really unique about Moringa School is we have been bootstrapped since we started. For the five years Moringa School has been in operation, this is the first year we’ve made any money outside what we got from student revenues. The first two years were really challenging. I never paid myself a salary for those two years and I ran the school using my savings. All I did at the time was focus on getting it to work,” she says.

“When starting the school, I partnered with a number of similar schools in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, who helped me understand how they develop their content and if we can use some of their material and adopt it to the local market. My experience working at Savannah Fund also enabled me meet a lot of developers in the country and with the support of the managing partner at the Fund, I was able to select the right team to make Moringa a reality.”

According to her, the team is what makes or breaks a company. Her first start-up, a millennial social saving App, failed not because of the idea, but because of lack of commitment from her team then. This was a mistake she hoped to avoid with Moringa School. However, she keeps learning from her mistakes. For Moringa School, they hire a lot for humility. According to Audrey, ego is the last thing you want in a company.

Today, the school is still living to the expectations she originally had for it. The school has been able to transform how programming is taught in the country from a theoretical way to a more hands-on approach with the student at the centre of it all.

“The school’s impact has been profound. I have met our school’s alumni who are senior developers yet all they were before were secondary school graduates. At the moment, we have a job placement rate of 89 per cent for students who go through our programme. You don’t have to go to college to get a job” she says.

Even though she has had to sacrifice time with her family just to get the school running she is proud of what they have been able to achieve. To other young entrepreneurs, she urges them on but at the same has a word of caution.

“Most young people assume that starting a company is an easy thing and after two or three years, you’ll already have made money. However, that’s not the case. Companies take time to build. So before starting out, make sure you’re ready for it. If you are resilient, focused and have grit, your journey will be fulfilling,” says Audrey.