As an Afro-optimist, it always warms the cockles of my heart when something positive is said about the continent, especially by someone from outside our shores. The latest person to do so is US technology entrepreneur Christina Sass, who averred in a recent interview that there is a glut of high-end information technology (IT) talent in Africa, which should come in handy in a world facing a desperate shortage of software engineers.

Sass realised this as far back as 2014, when she and like-minded American entrepreneurs teamed up with a Nigerian partner to found an outfit that recruits mostly young graduates from across the continent and trains them as software engineers before hiring them to global IT companies.

Called Andela, after our own Nelson Mandela, the five-year-old venture has an investor base that includes the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the charitable organisation of billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and tennis sensation Serena Williams. Former US President Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management came on board in January, ploughing in $100-million, thereby bringing the venture capital haul to date to $180-million. The latest injection will be used to expand the business and improve its internal data to allow clients – which include the likes of Google and Microsoft, as well as media conglomerate Viacom – to better track and manage remote workers.

Only the smartest brains are taken on, with only about 1% of applicants being successful in all previous intakes. As one Andela executive quipped, it is easier to get into the highly sought-after Harvard and Princeton universities, in the US, where only 6% and 7.4% respectively of those who apply for admission eventually make it, than to be accepted on the Andela programme.

The beauty about Andela’s business model is that the software engineers it recruits, trains and places with international tech companies are based on African soil, working out of offices in the Nigerian commercial hub of Lagos and in the capital cities of Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana and Egypt. This cuts down on the brain drain that afflicts much of Africa and helps to develop the continent’s tech ecosystem, as the software engineers – known in Andela circles as ‘Andelans’ – often go on to launch their own startups at the end of their four-year contract with Andela. In fact, only 10% of the first batch of alumni – recruited when the Lagos office opened its doors in 2014 – decided to seek employment with overseas organisations.

During the four-year contract period, the 1 300-odd software engineers on Andela’s books, who typically hold a computer science degree and are 25 years old on average, are paid only a third of the amount that the company receives from the international tech businesses, with the balance used to support the matchmaking service and to expand the business. But the 33% remuneration is not an amount to be sneezed at, equating to about $4 000 a year. However, at the end of the contract period, the Andelans stand a chance to earn top dollar – as much as $40 000 a year – should they be hired by the big global tech companies.

Do I hear someone saying there is nothing innovative about the Andela initiative, as large Indian staffing firms – the likes of Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra – have already treaded along this path, growing into multibillion-dollar businesses that provide organisations with low-cost programming talent?

There are two differences between the Andela model and the Indian outsourcing model. First, Andelans do not handle lower-skill projects, unlike their counterparts employed by the Indian companies, which have often been critised for harming American workers by offshoring some work. Second, they are more tightly integrated into the operations of their clients than traditional offshore workers and are hired for set periods of time rather than specific projects.

The success achieved by Andela, which expects to be placing about 10 000 African software engineers with top American companies within the next several years, should be enough to shut up people like Donald Trump, whose opinion of Africa is very low. In 2017, he infamously said Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” once they set foot on American soil. Now it is the self-same people who are servicing the tech giants of Silicon Valley.