Selection Tunisia
ReBootKamp
RBK is the only immersive coding program in Tunisia which produces employment-ready software engineers and connects them to companies providing decent jobs at scale. Through selective admissions, a top-notch curriculum, and strong relationships with companies,90% of RBK graduates secure a full-time position within 6 months of program completion. We bridge the skills gap between traditional educational offerings and existing companies’ on-the-job training capacities by producing high-quality, employment-ready junior software engineers and providing a hiring pipeline between RBK graduates and ICT companies. For this project, we will offer immersive coding programs in Ariana, Kef, Kairouan, and Medenine to train 1244 youth to become Full Stack Javascript software engineers with the demanded soft skills required by globally-competitive tech companies in Tunisia and beyond.
The Problem
Tunisian youth lack a clear pathway to decent employment, especially women and people living in marginalised regions. Local educational offerings neither equip youth with the technical skills, nor the transferable soft skills for decent jobs in their field of study, or to shift careers. Local businesses do not attempt to fill the gap with in-house training. Consequently, many well-paying jobs remain vacant, many youths remain unemployed, and local companies struggle to be productive and grow. Indeed, for those graduates in urban areas who succeed in finding jobs, they usually work in fields that do not match their qualifications or their preferred specialities and usually receive wages that are lower than their pay expectations.
Medium-skilled youth in Ariana, Kaf, Medenine, and Kairouan looking for better-quality jobs in the formal sector. Many unemployed young people in urban and rural areas are aspiring for better employment opportunities in the formal sector. They are not interested in informal and poor-quality jobs that do not meet work decency standards. Indeed, many of these young people, 28.5% of youth and 50% of women, are not in education, employment, or training
Young people have insufficient knowledge of their field of interest, as a result, most young people do not know which skills they need to develop to be employed in this field. Furthermore, young techies, especially women, in rural areas cannot find jobs since they cannot afford to travel or live in Tunis where most of the tech jobs are centralised. Local educational offerings do not equip young people with the technical skills, nor transferable soft skills for jobs in high-potential, resilient sectors such as the digital economy. Consequently, Tunisia suffers from high youth unemployment coupled with a lack of qualified candidates to meet ICT companies’ hiring needs.
The Solution
We aim to provide Tunisian youth with the skills required to fast-track their career perspectives and offer a pathway to decent employment and career growth perspectives. With multiple graduation classes each year, we provide employment-ready candidates when companies need them. We work directly with Tunisian ICT companies to position RBK as an effective recruiting channel for talented, diverse junior developers, thus offering an informal matching program between its graduates and companies.
We act on three dimensions:
Individual: providing unemployed youth with decent revenue impacts them directly. Most of our students are coming from vulnerable populations, who are able to pull themselves from poverty and aspire for a better future after completing our program. Furthermore, we empower youth with skills relevant to the 21st century. This empowerment gives youth generally and women specifically in rural areas confidence and increases their contribution to the local economy.
Community: Our graduates empower themselves and their communities directly by sustaining their immediate families but also by empowering other programs and being active in society. Some of our students have been appointed by local and international NGOs to manage programs like Hashem Buzer who is managing Google Developer Student clubs in Benghazi Libya or Heni Mezrani who is managing Orange Developer Center Tunis
Economy: Our graduates are able to contribute positively to the country’s GDP by performing in a growing sector. Also, the availability of highly skilled ICT professionals helps to reinforce the intellectual infrastructure of the country, bringing more opportunities and helping to improve the economy.
Additionality
With the help of CFYE, our impact will be accelerated through scaling, allowing us to produce the number of graduates that we normally graduate in one year in just a few months. This will simultaneously increase the number of young Tunisians securing decent employment in the digital economy and filling of open ICT positions in Tunisia, thus reducing youth unemployment and improving the productivity of existing companies.