Outlook

The power of word of mouth in Guinea

FATA.school’s mission is to create word-class training programs in software development for African youth. This past May, we organized the FATA contest as a way to give Guinean software developers an opportunity to express their needs and aspirations in terms of professional training.

We had to do our own data collection because of the very poor representation of Guinean in existing studies. For instance, there were only five Guineans over 70,000+ participants in the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, which depicts how developers across the world learn and level up.

Engagement over time

1335 people have taken part in the FATA contest, and 880 of them have filled in our survey. Upon survey completion, participants could increase their odds of winning the prize (a Chromebook Lenovo Duet) by completing coding activities, by inviting other people to join and by answering a quiz. The contest opened on May 1st and closed at midnight on May 31st. Overall more than 2000 activities were completed, you can see below how the engagement evolved over the duration of the contest.

How should we communicate with our learners?

As you can see in the previous graph, the level of engagement did not stay constant over time. There was a lot of activity in the first couple of days and then it decreased a lot before going back up again. The engagement peaked around May 11th and around May 25th. There is also an increased level of activity throughout the third week of the contest between May 16th and 21st.

The FATA contest gave us the opportunity to test a number of communication channels with our future learners. By correlating the timing of our communications with changes in level of engagement on the contest we can estimate the impact of our actions:

We can conclude that even though going on radio shows 📻 enabled us to spread the word about FATA’s mission much more broadly, it didn’t lead to an increase level of activity on the contest. On the other hand, emailing ✉️ participants to encourage them to collect more points and speaking at universities and conferences 🗣 had the intended impact.

Moreover, participants had the opportunity to indicate how they heard about FATA:

With 52% of participants hearing about FATA this way, Whatsapp is clearly the preferred communication channel, followed by “Family and Friends” (24%) and Facebook (22%).

The main takeaway from this is that word of mouth is by far the most effective way to reach our future learners in Guinea. More than 70% of people who logged in the contest did so after following one of the “personalized links” from the “Share on social media” contest activity. We were so fascinated by those network effects that we created an animation of the “FATA network” growing over time. We are very grateful to all the participants who helped us promote the FATA contest, and we congratulate Mamadou Bladé and Aminata Fofana for ending up as the man and woman with the most connections! 👏🏾👏🏾

Participants Profiles

Almost 70% of participants are between 18 and 24 years old and 86% have reached post secondary education. These high percentages are most likely caused in part by the ways we have communicated about the contest.

45% of participants don’t have easy access to a computer, on the other hand 77% can easily access the internet. Moreover 86% of visits on the website from Guinea during the month of May were from a smartphone. We are drawing two conclusions from this:

1. FATA's learning platform must be entirely usable from a smartphone
2. We need to do what we can to facilitate access to computers (for example by giving access to well equipped rooms) and to minimize the data cost for our learners (for instance by partnering with data providers).

People clearly expressed a need for short and very low-cost training programs: 52% of them have less than 8 hours available for training per week, often because they’re already pursuing a university degree. 70% can’t afford any training that would be over 500,000 GNF (about 50 euros).

Over 500 participants (57%) know the basics of programming and almost 100 of them have already been paid to write code. This makes us confident that the participants' profiles match our intended future learners. Among them 75% have 2 years or less of experience writing code. The word cloud below shows the various technologies participants are already familiar with:

And this one shows the most common training needs raised in the survey:

It was surprising to see “gestion de projet” (project management) appear so prominently. Unfortunately it looks like we may have accidentally influenced the submission with the way we prompted participants:

In the future we will need to be more careful to avoid creating anchoring effects with our survey questions!

With over 70% of respondents indicating only basic or no skills in English, and considering the importance of the English language in information and communications technology, we can still be confident that English is a must-have training module. Similarly, there is obviously a lot of interest in artificial intelligence, cyber security and application development (web and mobile).

19% of participants identified as women, even though this falls far from our gender parity goals, it still provides us with a good data set to identify differences with men.

For instance we are noticing that:

• It is as easy for women as for men to access the Internet but women have a harder time getting access to computers (47% vs 57%).
• The ratio of women claiming to have basic programming skills is a little lower than for men (50% vs 59%) and only 12% of women knowing how to code have been paid to do so vs 19% of men. However these differences in coding abilities are probably over estimated considering how women tend to underestimate their qualifications compared to men.

It is inspiring to see that the ratio of women was 2.5 times bigger in participants under 23: 26% vs 10% for folks over 23 years old (23 being participants median’s age).

Coding Activities

26% of participants took part in the visual coding activities but only 3% of them were able to complete all levels, taking an average of 7 days and 15 hours to do so.

12% of participants took part in the “treasure hunt”. It is worth noting that unlike the visual programming activities, the treasure hunt levels were much harder to complete using a smartphone. On the other hand almost 15% of the people who started were able to finish all levels, taking an average of 5 days and 18 hours to do so.

FATA congratulates the highest scoring men and women in the coding activities:

• Christine Camara 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Néné Aissata Bah 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Aissatou Bobo Diallo 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Mona Kpadonou 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Safiatou Baldé 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• François Gonothi Touré 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Mamadou Oury Baldé 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Aliou Albras Cissé 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Souleymane Bah 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
• Ibrahima Diallo 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

We also want to thank from the bottom of our hearts all the participants and all the people who helped us organize the contest. Thanks to you we now have all the data that we needed to launch FATA’s learning platform! 🚀

We regularly publish articles to inform our members and partners of the progress and impact of the FATA project. See all articles