Created by Africans for Africans 🌍+ Consonance@6
Africa to the world 🌏!
Hello 👋 Dear innovator
It’s 12 PM this Saturday and it is that time when innovation reigns freely without interruption.
The next 5 minutes, you'll spend on this newsletter (7, if you are a slow reader) might be all you need to birth that idea you have been hoarding from the world. You’ll discover that your ideas are valid, but you’ll need to pay rapt attention till the end.
Last week, we discussed a good number of amazing A.I creations and we loved discussing every single one of them in their uniqueness and versatility. We recapped this in our midweek check-in and shared info about a Twitter Space hosted by @Batelthebrand; Consonance’s Operations Partner. Make sure to check it out, if all these sound strange to you.
As you can tell from the email subject we’ll be discussing amazing products created by Africans that have been fully functional and effective in the African Labour/Talent Market. One of the products, we’ll be discussing today is part of a further read in our “Notable Reads For The Week” Section down below.
It’s so knowledge-packed and insightful, we might have to do a part two!
We’ll get straight into the day's business, but not without sharing this amazing meme, we found on tech Twitter.
Bumpa By Kelvin Umechukwu an Adetunji Opaleye
Tech genius Kelvin Umechukwu is not only the brilliant mind behind Consonance, but he is also the Co-founder and innovator of one of Africa’s leading e-commerce platforms.
Adetunji Opaleye is not only a cool guy, but he’s also a full-time overseer at Bumpa alongside Kelvin. He is the Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer at Bumpa, and he runs this award-winning social commerce platform with years of experience and a love for Africa.
The Bumpa team is actively building the future of e-commerce together and you will agree that this requires resilient and visionary leaders.
Kelvin in all of his endeavors is, first of all, creating job opportunities and spaces for African creatives and Bumpa is no exemption from this. He believes in inspiring innovation and therefore leads by example, showing young Africans what is possible.
You wanna know what his secret is?
His true secret 🤫 lies in finding his people aka community. Don’t tell him it was me that told you o🤐
I would have told you the million dollars that having a community is worth, but I already spent the entire month of February telling you to apply to Consonance’s community of like-minded innovators. So don't stress me 🙄.
I just told my boss’s secret and strayed off course a bit, so it will be a miracle if I still have my job after this…
...but before I’m out of a Job ☝🏽
What is Bumpa?
Bumpa is where you want to be as an entrepreneur, and it’s a platform where doing less is doing more.
If you just asked “Why?”, then you are right on track, because I’m going to tell you anyway. Bumpa is a social commerce platform helping entrepreneurs and their businesses operate more efficiently. There are so many commerce platforms out there that do not adequately cater to the business and the owner, but that's not an issue for today.
Bumpa not only has everything they need to set up a successful business but also all that their business needs to thrive. It is known for tools that play a managerial role in the relationship between entrepreneurs and their customers, through social media channels. It offers a 360 eCommerce experience in Africa for businesses as well as their owners, and they offer an all-rounded customer experience.
Bumpa has amazing partners across the world to help achieve its goal. These partners include Google, Paystack, FCMB, and more.
You can find out more about Bumpa here.
ALX by Fred Swaniker
Like every success story, this one starts in Lagos, Nigeria when Kenya-born and bred Fred Swaniker was on his engineering internship.
He observed something quite strange or let's say “new”. Most Nigerian parents back then would save up money and considered it a great achievement to send their wards out of the country for further studies.
This experience set him on a mission to transform education in Africa for Africans, who let's say cannot afford it.
Fred believes that Africa's greatest resource is its youth, he says that it's not our gold 🪙, diamond 💎 oil, or any other thing. He understands the broken system and how Universities do not necessarily prepare you for employment.
ALX is focused on developing three million ethical and entrepreneurial leaders that can create a transformational impact on the continent by 2030. This is quite a lot if you think about it, but ALX has been widely successful in the continual pursuit of its vision. The mantra says it perfectly “Doing hard things”
ALX seems to be at the forefront of anything digital education-related in Africa. From the virtual assistant programs to the hot tech courses and even to the entrepreneurship training, you name it and ALX has it going on or already in the works.
ALX's wins are almost innumerable, but I'll try to list some of 'em. For one, hardly will you find an African Millennial or Gen Z who has not come across one of ALX's ads or the other about a 100% free ALX course on the internet.
The courses are comprehensive and set up in a way that the students/beneficiaries have no choice but to be committed.
Not sure what I mean?
You'll have to have signed up for a course to understand the rudiments that bring the best out of the students in the ALX programs.
So far ALX graduates (as successful students who complete the courses are called) work in various companies around the world.
A few of these companies include Alibaba, Meta, Visa, Amazon, and even Google. Alx also has over 80,000 students who have graduated from its programs and these graduates have an 88% employment rate.
Alt_School by Hacksultan and Adewale Yusuf
First and foremost Hacksultan is that guy on Twitter, with all those brilliant tweets on issues and that supports upcoming tech talents with laptops and all.
I know this is not much of an introduction, but I really wish I knew what he looked like too 🤷🏽♀️. Let’s just move on 🙄…
Adewale Yusuf is the former founder of Techpoint, an innovator, and a visionary African. He not only understands the task ahead, but he also sees tech as a very important industry in the development of Africa, hence his passion for tech education.
HackSultan and Adewale Yusuf make a formidable team.
Believe it or not, Alt school is the dream school of so many tech-oriented Africans, and to some, it is the next Udemy. A certificate from Alt school is a goal that so many African youths strive to achieve in their tech journeys. This is true because the Alt school scholarships are highly sort after.
The programs are designed to help you launch your tech career and they describe themselves as a school that is not fully a school. You gerrit?
Alt School understands that “Not one size fits all” so they have various schools for various tech fields. Finally, a tech training platform that gets it!
There are three schools and they are namely; the School of Software Engineering, the School of Products, and the School of Data.
Alt School focuses on shaping the future of work, for both companies and talents. They want companies to have the best of the best, but they also want to make sure that the people they train are the best of the best. It’s the place you want to be as a growing tech bro or sis, the testimonials and good reviews say it all.
Alt school exists to breach the knowledge gap of some things that should simply be basic knowledge in the tech field.
Did Heroku Shock You? Switch to Pipeops
Freebies still exist! e shock you?
Check out Pipeops here! That’s what I have to start with, because now, that Heroku is no longer free, you don’t have to be stranded.
We heard from the grapevine of the tech vineyard that you now have to pay per deployment on Heroku 🙄. Not to worry, because Pipeops dey for you my friend.
The more you explore the depths of success in business, you would find the need for efficient cost optimization, scalable cloud architecture & infrastructure and so much more which PipeOps offers.
To make this good news even better in case you still don’t get the gist, Pieops offers free deployment of your backend and frontend apps.
Everyone loves free things, the question is what are you waiting for? 🤷🏽♀️
Innovator of The Week
Ifedayo Osun
Ifedayo Osun popularly known as Eleos is the founder of Figo Payments. Ifedayo is the description of possibilities not minding the circumstance, he’s that guy who always wants to create a solution.
Figo Payments is a platform that allows micro-scale businesses to process digital payments without the need for expensive integration. It does all these while also providing them with flexible payment options for their customers at affordable fees. The goal of Figo Payments is to simplify the digital payment experience for businesses in a continent where 90% of its transactions are cash-based. Thus far Figo Payment has processed over $500,000 in transactions, and with partnerships, it is looking to provide services to a hundred thousand farmers in the coming weeks.
Ifedayo is excited about building the Figo Payments team and how committed they are to the vision.
He is a man of few words and thus has a short but concise message for innovators who are still sitting on the fence. He says “Trying to figure everything out before starting is the biggest killer because you never will”
Simply put, he continues to say “You don’t have to have it all figured out before you start, just start with what you can”
Wanna know more about Figo payments? cause we really think you should.
Check it out here.
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The Consonance newsletter is going a whole ‘Nother level entirely, and we don’t want you or your community to be left behind. In case you missed it, we just launched our mid-week check-ins where we would share many helpful updates, to keep you connected.
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Thanks for always.
Notable Reads For The Week
Opportunities
Bumpa is hiring a full-time Account Manager in Nigeria!
Moniepoint is hiring all over Nigeria!
Andela is Hiring Remotely
Lemonade is hiring remotely in Africa
Enyata is hiring in Ghana
Operations Manager
Frontend Engineer
Backend Engineer
Product Manager
See Job requirements and description on Enyata’s Twitter and send applications to Careers@enyata.com