From an early age, you could tell that US-born Audrey Cheng was destined for greatness. At the tender age of 14, she found an interest in trading stocks. Audrey’s entrepreneurial spirit caught up later in life as she was studying global health. She learned about how NGOs were unsustainable in developing countries and in that, discovered the power businesses have in building economies. She sought to understand if the same incubation concept could be brought to emerging countries by building passionate entrepreneurs. After acquiring a degree in journalism and global health at Northwestern University, Audrey turned down a lucrative job offer in the US and packed her bags to move to Kenya with the aim of helping budding entrepreneurs build their businesses. This resolve led her to Savannah Fund, a venture capital firm based in Nairobi, Kenya, that runs both an accelerator and seed investment in early stage tech companies across Africa.
Audrey was working at CNBC when she came across an article on how Savannah Fund was running their first accelerator class. Inclined to their vision, she reached out to the Managing Partner and offered to assist in whatever capacity she could. What started out as a three month stint eventually led to the ultimate game changer in Audrey’s life. After a year of giving her services to the company, she made the decision to permanently move to Kenya and give her full time support to the organisation.
Breaking barriers, Audrey at the age of 20 founded her own coding academy Moringa School, a successful feat that has garnered her both local and international awards. In 2016, she was a Forbes 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneur. Cheng launched the Moringa School with her Kenyan co-founder Frank Tamre a few months after her arrival in Kenya. This decision to start the school came about when she realised that the skills shortage was one of the largest bottlenecks for entrepreneurs. She came across a 2011 survey that stated that 45% of employers in Kenya with developer positions were unable to find qualified talent. Further to that she started going to universities and taking training programmes to understand how computer science was being taught, only to discover the use of ineffective teaching methodologies and outdated content everywhere she went. Students were writing code on paper. That is when she made up her mind to start a school with the main aim of producing the best talent in Africa.
Cheng has bootstrapped Moringa since it began. This was intentional, as she wanted to challenge herself to build a company with a 100% focus on her customer needs. It was hard at the beginning; make no mistake, but the self-determined and ambitious Audrey saw to its success. Her initial marketing strategy for the school had been simple: social media and network marketing. This created quite a buzz online and in the tech community. In the first class, the team interviewed over 120 people and accepted the top 4 students. Today the 24-year old presides over a school that has produced 110 graduates from Moringa Core and over 250 from Moringa Prep – with a 95 per cent employment rate, something radical to say the least, given Kenya’s current youth unemployment rate.
Moringa has three programs: SPOC (secondary school open-source curriculum) builds free, introduction to coding content for secondary school computer clubs across Kenya; Moringa Prep is a 5-week, full-time fundamentals of programming course and Moringa Core is a 15-week, full-time advanced programming course (with a full-stack and Android track). Coupled with the school programs, her target age ranges between 18 to 30 years old. The students attend classes up to five times a week and learn in a blended learning methodology, which means students take ownership over their education and are guided by teachers, rather than lectured. This is part of Cheng’s vision of a whole new education system, one that she hopes to pioneer in Nairobi, but to implement the world over.
Having seen the teaching methods adopted by our local universities, Cheng was out to change the game. Moringa School’s approach to teaching has an integrative system where students guide classes as much as the teachers do, Cheng says. “Instead of being the people who know everything, teachers are constantly learning with the students as well. We already have the content built so that when students get to more advanced topics or when they’re thinking outside the box and building projects, teachers get involved and they co-create that together.” Given her imminent success in her first school, Cheng intends to both expand Moringa School across Africa and to other skillsets. Changing the face of education is all part of her grand plan of helping improve lives in the developing world. “For me, education is definitely a huge part of that. Giving people truly world-class education and skills will elevate them to a level where they can contribute to society and/or build successful companies.”
However not all has been rosy for the young ambitious lady with a desire to change the world one school at a time! For the first year, she had her fair share of startup woes. When Moringa was started, the timing coincided with when Nairobi Aviation School was caught up in their scandal, which led to a deep mistrust of new schools and academies. She now has a stable team that comprises of 30 ‘rock stars’ (a term coined by her staff of millennials, meaning creative and brilliant and talented) ready to scale Moringa.
Raised in the US by financially-disadvantaged Taiwanese immigrants, the forceful young woman learned a wealth of self-reliance, helping to pay for her parents’ mortgage as a teenager after learning to trade stocks at 14 and working from an early age. While she acknowledges the difficulties she faced guiding her parents through an America that wasn’t always accepting of immigrants, Audrey says it is partially responsible for her successes today; “I learned that whatever I wanted to do in the world, I can create.”
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