Closing the Gap for Digital Access in Africa

Overview

In today’s world, access to technology is essential to unlocking opportunities for millions, if not billions, of people. Yet, for many people across Africa, the digital divide stands as a significant barrier—limiting education, employment, and social mobility.

At Onja, we are dedicated to closing this gap by equipping brilliant young people from underprivileged backgrounds with the skills and resources they need to succeed in the digital economy. This is not just a story of coding classes—it’s about empowerment, and unlocking Africa’s untapped potential.

What is the digital divide?

The digital divide refers to the gap between those with access to technology and digital literacy, and those without. In Africa, this divide is particularly stark, shaped by a complex mix of economic, infrastructural, and social barriers.

This digital divide leaves many young people trapped in cycles of economic disadvantage, unable to compete in the global job market. However, we believe that Africa’s youth have the potential to reverse this trend—if given the right tools. Across the African continent, the emergence of software development and remote jobs is creating economic change for many people.

While new innovations like Starlink are starting to shift access issues to internet connectivity in many corners of the world, being unable to use reliable hardware is still a problem for many people.

Internet is only one piece of the puzzle

Onja’s model is to train brilliant, underprivileged young people into software developers, linking them with remote jobs in international companies. An important part of our training program is the provision of hardware for our students.

Similarly, once our developers graduate and are working in international teams, it is essential that they have reliable and up to date hardware to code and test with, and to have meetings with their teams. By this stage they are working professionally and generating income, allowing Onja to provide them with new, high-performance computers so they can work at the highest level.

Making sure our students and developers are equipped with everything they need to learn and do their jobs well is an important part of what we do here at Onja. Recently, we wrote a blog about how getting access to Starlink has helped increase Onja’s ability to support our developers to do the best work they can, uninterrupted by connectivity issues. However, access to good internet is not the only consideration when it comes to bridging the digital divide.

Closing the Gap

So how do we make sure our students and developers have all the equipment they need to succeed? For our working developers, providing top of the line hardware is not an issue. We purchase new, high-performance machines for them to work with. However, for the hundreds of students we will train in the coming years, the costs of purchasing brand new equipment would be very large and, frankly, unnecessary.

While training, our students need reasonably high-performance machines, but it does not matter if the machines are a couple of years old. In order to keep costs down, and thus be able to train as many students as possible, we have partnered with Close the Gap, a leading social enterprise committed to bridging the digital divide by providing high-quality, pre-owned IT devices to empower individuals, organizations, and entrepreneurs with the tools they need to thrive in the digital economy.

We highly appreciate that the team at Close the Gap considered our particular need for high performance hardware, and went out of their way to find us a large number of their most powerful machines. We were thrilled to receive 158 laptops, 158 monitors, and 4 servers at very competitive rates, with very little use, ready for our next wave of students to use

Together, Onja and Close the Gap are transforming lives and unlocking Africa’s potential. By combining Onja’s training programs with CTG’s affordable IT solutions, we are creating a pathway to success for thousands of young people.

Hire developers with Onja

The challenge of the digital divide still looms large, but it is thoroughly outmatched by the potential of Africa’s young people. At Onja, we help channel the positive outcomes created by closing the digital divide, by linking these talented developers with careers where they can earn a life-changing income. If your company is looking to hire developers for your team, reach out to us via the Onja website, and help close the gap for young people in Madagascar.