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By Henry Ojelu

Africa’s leading tech talent institute, Decagon, which set out on an ambitious mission in 2018 to enable exceptional young Nigerians to launch careers as world-class software engineers has now graduated over 500 developers who are gainfully employed by top companies around the world.  

According to the founder and Chief Executive Officer, Chika Nwobi, this is the first major milestone in the furtherance of the institute’s mission to make Nigeria among the top 10 software engineering countries in the world.

Nwobi said this at a dinner and awards ceremony of the institute held in Lagos to celebrate the milestone of enabling over 500 DecaDevs.

In attendance were the global CFO of Lumos global, Laurens Kreuze; the Co-founder of Appzone, Emeka Emetarom; representatives from Sterling Bank, Microsoft, Main One, and other well-known faces in the African tech space.

Speaking at the event, Nwobi said Decagon institute has graduated 10 cohorts with over 500 software engineers now working at multinational companies like Indeed, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Sterling, RenMoney, MaxNG, Carbon, among others.

Stressing on the need to be trained by the tech institute, Nwobi asserted that DecaDevs are developers that have been equipped by Decagon with various skills to perform optimally in the technological sector.

He, however, commended Sterling bank for believing in Decagon and investing in young Nigerians as a strategic student loan partners.

“We want the brightest to get access to this life-changing-opportunity regardless of ability to pay, so we provide accommodation, feeding, stipends, laptops and training on a learn-first-and-pay-later model. We equip the DecaDevs to land jobs in top companies and we are proud of them for the 100 per cent success rate and for also faithfully repaying their loans.

One of the beneficiaries, Joshua Christopher said the institute assisted him in achieving his dream within 2 years.

He noted, “Decagon was a catalyst to achieving my career goals. What I would have achieved in 5 years, I was able to achieve in 2 short years.”

Another beneficiary, Chidinma Ifeh, said, “After Decagon, I was placed in a tech company Terragon. I worked as a back-end engineer, I use Node stack. I won’t have been able to do this without Decagon.”