Adewale Yusuf
Adewale Yusuf is one of the players in the Nigerian startup scene who is passionate about using innovations to improve education. He is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of startups like AltSchool Africa, a platform that trains people on technical skills and TalentQL, a platform building a world-class engineering team. Through these startups, Adewale Yusuf is building the future of work for talents in Africa.
Adewale obtained a degree in Political Science and Economics from the University of Ibadan and an executive certificate from HarvardX
With a demonstrated history of building tech startups in Nigeria, Adewale founded and led Techpoint Africa, a leading technology media platform. Techpoint is instrumental in showcasing the impact of technology on the Nigerian narrative. Adewale is also the Chief host of Techpoint Inspired, Nigeria’s largest tech conference, and Techpoint Build Nigeria’s largest Startup Conference & Exhibition.
To facilitate growth in the Nigerian technology landscape and build more tech talents, Adewale stepped down as publisher of Techpoint Africa on 9th November 2020. In turn, he launched TalentQL — Talent Quiet Location — to hire, develop, and manage remote talent for global companies.
Adewale is constantly reminded of the importance and value of tech talent in Nigeria and the diaspora. A prior concern for him, which was the concentration of most tech talent in Lagos is now being solved with TalentQL. The startup focuses on growing talents outside Lagos.
TalentQL is being developed with the help and expertise of Opeyemi Awoyemi and Sultan Akintunde. Opeyemi Awoyemi is the Co-founder of the cloud-hosting company, Whogohost; and Jobberman, one of Africa’s largest online recruitment companies while Sultan Akintunde is the founder of non-profit tech accelerator, DevCareer, an organization well known for its efforts on upcoming developers.
Since starting TalentQL a year ago, Adewale has been able to connect developers from Nigeria to the UK, US, Dubai and other parts of the world. TalentQL has also assisted many African companies to acquire the best talents.
Alongside TalentQL is also AltSchool Africa which aims to be the largest school on the continent. Adewale started AltSchool Africa following the rising demand for tech skills in the new world of work to give access to the market, to the in-demand skills in the market, and to have people that actually qualify to take up these positions. The startup recently secured a $1m pre-seed funds to scale Its efforts.
Adewale’s AltSchool Africa offers diplomas in software engineering, which is front-end and back-end engineering and cloud engineering. The startup is also preparing to launch the school of product and blockchain and more tech schools will be launched going forward. With the AltSchool Africa project, Adewale wants to train ten million Africans in the next eight years.
We applaud Adewale Yusuf for his contribution to the Nigerian technology and education space.