Clients Demand Forces Andela To Expand Across Africa After Mass Sacking

Andela will now open up its operation to all African countries in order to meet clients' demands. This means the software engineering talent pool firm will no longer operate the selective pattern, ensuring more engineers join its workforce - which will result in the creation of more jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Andela co-founder, Jeremy Johnson, the workforce of the firm shouldn't be limited by proximity. The new operational phase will enable ready-made engineers - who are already experienced in Node, React, Python and Ruby - gain access to top companies in need of their expertise through Andela.

Andela's clients consist of the following Cloudflare, Wellio, ViacomCBS and Women Who Code. The exclusion of location will now boost Andela's engineer workforce to about 500,000 in Africa, "Over the past five years, we have become experts at identifying engineering excellence from non-traditional backgrounds.

"We know that there are extremely talented engineers across Africa and we believe that opportunity should not be limited by proximity to a major tech hub. Being a remote-first engineering organization allows us to open up access to Andela for engineers across the continent,” Johnson said in a Nairametrics report.

Andela currently operates in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, and has completely transitioned into a remote organization.

A New Phase After Mass Sacking

Andela's decision to expand its workforce comes a month after sacking several of its engineers. Andela laid off 135 engineers as the firm struggled due to COVID-19 impact on its clients. Andela's business partners are unable to request or keep these engineers, hence, cutting down on expenses.

The retrenchment was done after Andela's Chief Executive Officer, Jeremy Johnson held a video-conference call with employees in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Egypt, and the United States. While Andela didn't downsize at its subsidiaries in Ghana and Rwanda, other locations where Andela operates experienced retrenchment.

The 135 workers sacked represents 10% of the company's workforce. It was also reported by Techcabal that Directors of the talent pool company will receive a salary cut. Andela was said to be pondering slashing the salary of the workers rather than an alright sack, however, it was disclosed that such a measure will only have less impact on the company's finances.

At the time, Johnson had stated, “While our customer base has held up better than most, the majority have still been impacted by the economic downturn,”. The company expects to “see churn spike this year as well as a decline in new customers due to the economic uncertainty.” This shows Andela is struggling due to COVID-19.