Gebeya which means marketplace in Amharic is an online marketplace for top IT professionals. The platform when launched will allow these professionals to showcase and contribute their experience and skills to software projects.
For a business, the platform will offer unique access to a pool of talent that will help you get the project right and on budget. For the IT professionals, Gebeya will allow them to target their skills and expertise to the businesses that need them will getting compensated at top rates. For the untrained coder, it will open the doors to a world of professional programming through a world class training academy (the academy will be based in Ethiopia).
Gebeya’s journey started out years ago when Coders4Africa (C4A) was featured in the 2012 Information Economy Report prepared by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The report stated that Africa only impacted about 3% of the $1.3 trillion USD in global IT revenue. Yet Africa is the world’s second-largest and second most populous continent with 1.2 billion people. C4A took up the challenge to get more Africans involved in the global IT economy. They did this by training hundreds of coders in Kenya, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Tunisia and Ethiopia.
In April this year, CEO and co-founder of C4A Amadou Daffe a native of Senegal travelled to Silicon Valley to find investors who could help C4A scale. At Silicon Valley he met Hiruy Amanuel, a young investor and self -made entrepreneur of Ethiopian origin. During a brain storming session, the two came up with an idea of starting up a software engineering company coupled with a platform that would match graduates with clients. As such Gebeya was conceived as a brainchild of C4A in Ethiopia with offices in Kenya and the USA.
The IT training program will be launched in Ethiopia with a view of graduating approximately 5,000 students in the next 5 years. Gebeya’s marketing team will be based here as we have one of the highest demands for software developers in Africa and is home to African headquarters of many Fortune 500 companies. This they believe will provide an opportunity to accelerate customer acquisition.
You can apply for the training here.