Audrey Cheng is a Kenyan-American entrepreneur who founded Moringa School in 2014, one of East Africa's most prominent coding bootcamps. Her work addressed a fundamental bottleneck in Silicon Savannah: the shortage of job-ready software developers in an ecosystem that was attracting increasing venture capital and international attention but could not find enough engineers to build the products investors were funding.
Cheng grew up between Kenya and the United States, a dual identity that shaped her entrepreneurial perspective. She studied at the University of Virginia and worked in technology and social enterprise in the US before returning to Nairobi to start Moringa. The decision to focus on developer training rather than a technology product was informed by conversations with Nairobi startup founders who consistently identified talent as their most binding constraint. Companies like Andela, Cellulant, and Safaricom competed intensely for experienced developers, while Kenyan universities produced computer science graduates whose skills were misaligned with industry needs.
Moringa's intensive 20-week programme compressed practical software development training - JavaScript, Python, React, Ruby on Rails, databases, version control - into a curriculum designed to produce employable developers. The pedagogical model drew on coding bootcamp practices from the United States but was adapted for the Kenyan context. Cheng incorporated soft skills training, recognising that many Moringa graduates would work with international remote teams where communication and professional presentation were as important as code quality.
Cheng built partnerships with technology companies who sponsored students and hired graduates, creating a pipeline that gave Moringa both revenue and placement metrics. Safaricom, international tech firms with Nairobi offices, and startups across the ecosystem recruited from Moringa's graduating classes. By the early 2020s, the school had produced over 3,000 graduates, with placement rates above 80 percent.
Cheng also became a prominent voice in discussions about women in African technology. As a female founder in an ecosystem where the vast majority of venture funding went to male-led companies, and where women were underrepresented in engineering roles, she advocated for inclusive hiring practices and supported scholarship programmes targeting women entering tech careers.
Moringa raised funding from Africa-focused investors and expanded its offerings to include data science, cybersecurity, and UI/UX design - reflecting evolving market demand and Cheng's strategy of building an institution that could adapt as the technology landscape shifted. Her vision for Moringa extended beyond a single coding school to a model for technical education that could be replicated across African markets.
See Also
Sources
- Bright, Jake. "Moringa School Is Training the Next Generation of African Developers." TechCrunch, 2018.
- Mulupi, Dinfin. "Audrey Cheng on Closing Kenya's Developer Skills Gap." How We Made It in Africa, 2019.
- Jackson, Tom. "Moringa School Expands Curriculum to Data Science and Cybersecurity." Disrupt Africa, 2020.