forLoop Africa, a community of software developers across the African continent, has signed partnerships with several companies across the continent. The list includes Flutterwave, Africa's Talking, Whogohost, Cloudinary and recently Gitlab.
This was confirmed to us in an email chat with Ridwan Olalere, the forLoop Africa founder, and Sally Mugure, the developer outreach in charge at Africa's Talking.
"These companies align with our vision to develop more world-class developers across the continent through collaborative learning and distributed mentoring," Ridwan wrote in an email.
Earlier on, we had written to Africa's Talking to confirm a rumor about a cash injection in the region of USD 20,000 - 30,000 into the forLoop Africa community. But, in the same conversation, they declined to confirm nor deny.
Sally Mugure, however, said that they are not investing in the community. Though admitted they "are currently sponsoring their activities."
"Just a clarification, we are not investing in forLoop, we are simply sponsoring their activities as they launch into 10 African countries in 2018," Sally Mugure wrote in an email. Sally also added that they "are very excited to be working closely with them."
Ridwan clarified that the partnerships are in form of "monetary, social, and expansion support." Yet declining to point out how much in monetary terms. Saying, "I am not sure Flutterwave, Africastalking, Cloudinary, Gitlab (just confirmed) want me to discuss this."
Currently, the forLoop Africa community covers Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana. With Malawi, Tanzania, Egypt, South Africa, Rwanda, Tanzania, Benin, and Ghana that were set for 2018 also able to start the community earlier. Though Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe will be joining in 2018.
"We are creating the largest independent developer community across Africa which will help increase the world-class competency," Ridwan wrote.
Related: forLoop Kampala organizing an All Java Everything themed event
The community is a non-profit, that is self-funded.
"We the organizers, the board of trustees also use our funds to finance the activities. In fact, in the past 17 months, the most money for financing was from us the board of trustees," Ridwan wrote.
The partners will be supporting the developers in the forLoop community as a way of giving back. forLoop, in return, will promote their services during their events.
"I think the most important thing you should take away from this partnership is that we will be working together to encourage the evolution of better engineers as we also work on reducing any pain points that they may face when trying to build solutions," Sally Mugure wrote.
These pain points, according to Sally, include "access to relevant tech content, mentorship, talent pipeline, access to resources you need while building a solution and a whole lot more."
Commenting on how the two parties will work together, Sally says they "will be working together on developer outreach initiatives, especially in campuses."
"This will be everything from organizing events to creating helpful instructive content for the student and a couple of other exciting projects that can come up along the way".