forloop Africa which started as a community for Nigerian developers is now set for North Africa expansion.
In her (pen)ultimate year (2015/2016) at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Microbiology student—Ada "Kolokodess" Nduka Oyom—organised the Google Developers Group (GDG) chapter for UNN. According to her, she "fancied all the cool technologies" but was never quite sure on how best to proceed. In 2017, she joined a tech fellowship, Switch—that was training and placing developers with local companies. Her days organising GDG UNN and her interactions while at Switch gave her a decent exposure into the budding tech ecosystem in Nigeria. From there, she continued to attend meetups like forloop and her network further expanded. In 2018, she was noticed by the founder of forloop, Ridwan Olalere who offered her a role to build out the forloop podcast channel.
I've been a member of forLoop since 2017, I think. I was just an (active) meet up attendee really until 2018 when Ridwan reached out to me to know if I would love to host the podcast, I said yes and the rest is history.
Today, the forloop podcast is available on major platforms like iTunes, Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, and Castbox. They have run eight episodes which has seen 3000+ offline downloads.
forloop Africa has spurred many to stay abreast of the latest technological trends while encouraging them to hone their craft of software development. Particularly, for volunteers like Ada, she has been able to sharpen her soft skills as well as connect with a lot of technical talent from across Africa. A feat she does not take lightly.
Being an active member of forloopafrica has helped me grow in lots of areas; technical skills and soft skills, seeing that I run the podcast, I always have to be on top of new tech, happenings in the tech world and co, while becoming better as a developer from meetups, newsletter features etc. It's also availed me the opportunity to meet and engage with the larger Developer community across Africa.
Ada like many other volunteers of forloop Africa are simply driven by the potential impact their investment in such a nascent and previously overlooked market like Nigeria can have on the continent.
An evolution of the developer community in Nigeria
But this wasn't always the case that hundreds of people would assemble in Nigeria for a developer-focused event. So, what was the tipping point?
Perhaps, it might help to go back to the years before Mark Zuckerberg—a developer icon—visited Nigeria in 2016, after his foundation led a $24 million fund raise for Andela, a company that trains African youths on professional software development.