Foundry

Ship real products.Create real companies.

Sister company of the ACA where devs are hired as staff engineers and startups are formed

Programs Partner

Maseru, Lesotho

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Gaborone, Botswana

// Foundry thesis

Acquiring the skill is only half the problem. Opportunity has to exist at home.

Acquiring the skills to develop software but not having the opportunity to apply them has always been half the problem in Africa. Being enticed to move away from their home country makes it weaker and poorer. Providing remote contract engineering jobs from all over the world helps build the native economy and software development ecosystems.

Sitting at the top of the pyramid of opportunities that the Foundry provides is to found new companies that are staffed by their compatriots, creating the maximum benefit for the engineers and Africa.

These are a few of the projects that our team of cohort devs and engineering leads have been developing.

Africa Code Foundry

A venture studio where cohort devs and engineering leads build products, staff real work, and learn what production ownership feels like.

Fidelis Loans

A DeFi lending startup on the Algorand Blockchain

Fidelis is a startup being incubated from team members of the Africa Code Academy seeking to provide fast non-collateralized loans by staking Trust Point tokens from trusted backers in the lender's social network.

Fidelis seeks to disrupt the informal lending economy, often the only option for ordinary Africans to obtain short-term credit. Apart from excessively high interest rates, loan sharks often use intimidation and coercion to enforce repayments.

Utilizing the Algorand blockchain, approval, tracking, and disbursement of funds are fully automated through smart contracts, making it cost-effective and scalable for growth across Africa.

By utilizing Trust Points for both borrowing and backing of loans, Fidelis also builds up a social network credit scoring system that can create further opportunities to offer financial services to the most trusted and trustworthy customers.

Fidelis was awarded a grant from the Algorand Foundation.

FarmAI Egg Marketplace

Building an online community of resources and information for small scale farmers in Africa

The farming marketplace project aims to provide solutions that help small-scale farmers in Southern Africa, with the goal of developing an online community where farmers can find resources and information.

The pilot deployment focuses on helping poultry farmers get their eggs to market by providing access to a broader marketplace and creating a virtual co-op where a pool of smaller egg producers can be matched to larger buyers.

Visit project

FireSMS

An affordable text message API for small businesses in Southern Africa

FireSMS is a leader in the Lesotho market in providing genuinely affordable messaging with access to APIs that allow businesses to easily send bulk messages to customers.

FireSMS is also looking to offer integration services to companies to help them transition to the platform.

Action

Have a product problem students can learn from?

The Foundry exists to create opportunities where developers can apply their skills, staff real engineering work, and form new companies.

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