The History of A2SV

Our humble beginnings began in a small classroom in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia training 22 software engineering students who had shown interest in a program that promised to spread their wings and take them to top tech companies. That is when Emre Varol's dream started to be more precise and take form upon realizing that innovative minds existed in Africa but lacked support and quality tech education to bring talent, diversity, and inclusion to the tech industry. All this led to him founding A2SV | Africa to Silicon Valley , a non-profit organization that trains and connects software engineering students in Africa with top tech companies worldwide. As a result, they create digital solutions to solve problems in their home countries.

Emre Varol , the First Heart Behind A2SV - 2019

A2SV | Africa to Silicon Valley was initiated by Emre Varol in 2019. He had worked for 7 years at Google, Palantir, and Liftoff as a software and machine learning engineer. After dedicating his Masters thesis to vulnerable children in Africa, Emre realized it was by chance not to be born to such vulnerable conditions; otherwise, there is so much talent in Africa, but the young people lack opportunities to use it. After doing a little research and inspiration from role models like Jeff Dean , who have had real-life experiences in Africa, that inspired him to go there. Since he had never been to Africa, ideally, a populous, English-speaking African country with limited resources would be best to start making an impact. A former Liftoff colleague, Yordanos A. , recommended her native country: Ethiopia.

Emre tried sending emails to expats, volunteers, and professors in Ethiopia, but nobody replied. He did not feel defeated but, nonetheless, proceeded to secure a visa, flight ticket, and hotel room. Upon arrival, one thing that was amazing about Ethiopia was its welcoming people, and quickly, Emre Varol found his way to Addis Ababa University , which is one of the best schools in the country. There he met the software engineering department head, Natnael Argaw, and student council head, Wubayehu Agonafir, to whom he shared what at the time was his vision of A2SV, and they asked him to be a guest lecturer and offer the program as an informal course. Having been a former lecturer assistant at TüB?TAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) camps, training some of the brightest minds in the country to become competitive programmers, Emre quickly pulled together a training syllabus, and this is how the A2SV journey started.

The Digital Divide in Africa

To kickstart, our founder and the AAU software engineering department sent out a Google Form for applications to non-graduating software engineering students. Our first group of students were chosen based on cGPA, relevant course grades, and staff recommendations. To understand our situation better, we must recognize the digital divide in all African countries and other parts of the world. According to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, only 33% of Africans were using the internet as of 2021. This research highlights that about 871 million people are being left behind. The A2SV program serves to create a bridge between African dreams and the Silicon Valley, making all dreams matter and possible.

First Phase - Training The First 22 Students

(November 2019 - March 2020)

As a young organization starting with no funding, our program started with only 22 smart students to train, and some of them were using their smartphones as they needed to own a decent laptop. After working hard in the circumstances with limited resources, by March 2020, our team achieved a 27% success rate in Google interviews. It was a decent start. Our early success was proof that “talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not.”

Covid 19 strikes

(March 2020 - August 2020)

Besides limited equipment, the other common problem in Africa in attaining quality education was the need to attain more skilled mentors, gain opportunities to work on products that operate at scale, acquire financial support, and expose the students to more practical communication skills. Therefore, Emre had to look into assembling a team for this journey and fly back to California to seek funding from top tech companies.?

The Covid 19 lockdown measures went into effect the day he landed. Sadly, our dream of bringing Africa to Silicon Valley was postponed. All plans to visit top tech companies like Meta , 苹果 , and 微软 to form interview partnerships fell through the cracks, and hiring new interns fell off their list of priorities.

Covid 19 SWE Product Results - TrackSym

Considering the situation, we brainstormed with the students in teams, figuring out what social impact to deliver in society as a people affected by the pandemic like the rest of the world. Our students built a symptom-tracking and information system for COVID-19: TrackSym.?

TrackSym is a non-commercial application that uses crowd-sourcing to collect and visualize the density of the relevant symptoms. Users can anonymously report symptoms and choose a location to see the density of symptoms in a map view. The app can help people avoid visiting public spaces heavily used by symptomatic people. Although with good intentions and useful developed features, scaling the platform in Africa proved difficult.

Ethiopian Ministry of Health Collaboration with TrackSym

(September 2020 - December 2020)

In September 2020, we flew back to Ethiopia and still believed that TrackSym could help to stop the spread of COVID-19. We started collaborating with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health to understand the field's problems better and improve TrackSym. In addressing the Covid 19 widespread, we were excited to do something at a national scale and prove our projects' sustainability.

However, after a three-month collaboration with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health, Emre and the A2SV small team decided to move faster by working independently, without government bureaucracy. The two biggest lessons we learnt from TrackSym were the importance of proper product management and the difficulty of government partnerships. From there, we decided to build a product management unit. As a guest lecturer at AAU, Emre also taught Digital Logic Design with Solomon Shiferaw as his assistant. Solomon bought into our vision and joined A2SV as a product manager.

Second Phase: Challenges During the Covid Pandemic

(March 2020 - April 2021)?

Google had to cancel fall internships. Addis Ababa University decided to pause education, and the students went home. During this time, internet communication shifted into the students' homes. From April 2020 to the second quarter of 2021, our primary focus was on project development and ways to slow the spread of COVID-19 in Africa. As a result, we fell behind on the interview track. To catch up, we had our second camp in October. In this second phase, we achieved a 59% success rate in Google internship interviews. 13 out of 22 of our students passed. Our goal remained to turn Africa to Silicon Valley dream into a reality by the summer of 2021. To our dismay, events played out differently.

However, our students who had succeeded were not taken into the project matching pool in the U.S. due to the U.S. Exchange Visitor Program’s pause on J1 visas. After being on hold until the end of March 2021, we received news that U.S. summer internships were no longer possible. As a result, Google moved our students to the EMEA project matching pool in April, which was nearing the end of the pool submission deadline. As a result, only three out of 13 students found matches in two weeks.

Building The Best Team and Establishing Our Offices

(April 2021 - December 2021)

Our second group of students went through similar education but with two primary differences to help us create a more scalable program. At first, Emre orchestrated the education to focus on personal development mainly instead of delivering everything. For example, 90% of the lectures were delivered by first-group students. Secondly, we updated the lecture format based on student feedback and wanted our program and educational system to become more interactive. We found that it is easier to scale A2SV with the help of experienced students than with brand new instructors. Meanwhile, an interested first group of students got trained on the introduction to machine learning track. By the end of March 2021, this training chapter was complete for both groups.

Day by day, it became more evident that we lacked some expertise at A2SV. At the same time, we did not have enough capital to hire experts full-time. It became the perfect time for Emre to gather a voluntary A2SV board and some mentors to help implement and make changes to the program, which included working on more projects, remote education, partnerships, and efforts to gain public visibility. A2SV was happy to expand the program to another university in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa Science, and Technology University. As of December 22, 2021, A2SV Foundation became an official non-profit organization in California, U.S., located at 739 Waverley Street, Palo Alto, CA 9430.

Finding Interview Partners, Our SWE Interview Success Rate Grows

We were happy to form interview partnerships with 谷歌 , LinkedIn , Palantir Technologies , Databricks , and Meta , which helped our students attain internships and full-time positions at Google, Databricks, Palantir, and 亚马逊 . As of September 2022, 31 out of 44 A2SV students who completed the training passed Google software engineering interviews. These statistics show our growth and highlight that A2SV students are 35 times more likely to pass Google software engineering interviews than average candidates.

A2SV Celebrates Google As A Financial Sponsor

Recently, A2SV Foundation announced its gratitude to Google for financially supporting the program and helping its mission to bring quality education to Africa, improve digital opportunities and enable us to expand to Ghana in 2023. This support will help us recruit more software engineering students from different African countries. We will ensure students receive quality education by buying proper equipment and establishing our offices and staff in the US, Ethiopia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. The A2SV training program includes activities and learning of practical skills we would not be able to carry out without Google’s financial support for our life-changing program.

The ability of Africa’s brilliant students to attain placements at top tech companies is also addressing issues to do with unemployment and poverty because our students come from households that earn US$100 to US$300 basic incomes per month. The A2SV program connects them to global opportunities where they can earn US$3000 to US$6000 monthly. To foster a sustainable program, our alumni students also get to work for A2SV, become our Heads of Education, and train current cohorts. We want local talent and resources to recycle themselves in different African communities. ?

A2SV Foundation Today

Africa’s future depends on innovative and transformative technologies to fuel rapid economic growth and lift millions of people out of poverty. If one wants something to change, they have to be the change. The dream of connecting talented African software engineering students to top tech companies has proved possible, and we are still working effortlessly to achieve our goals and mission. Our students have attained internships and full-time opportunities at Google, Amazon, Palantir, Databricks, and LinkedIn. In 2023, we are training 330 students, and we know we can do more together. To join us in empowering and educating young software engineers for tech-driven change in Africa, please reach out to Emre : [email protected] or donate to our cause here: https://a2sv.org/?form=donate