Overview

About Onja

Onja is a social enterprise training underprivileged youth into world-class software developers.

We find the brightest students in Madagascar who can’t afford to continue their education, and train them in English language and software development. After just two-and-a-half years they are ready to work as remote front-end software developers in international tech teams.

Once in a job, our developers earn a good salary that helps them support their families and pay forward the opportunity to a new wave of students. They unlock exciting careers that fulfil their potential, and accelerate the development of their nation (see ‘How Onja Works’ below).

Our first cohort, ‘Wave 1’, consists of nineteen talented and committed graduates who are now working remotely for our partner companies in Europe and the US. With this immensely successful first cohort, and a proven social model, our goal is now to scale our impact: we aim to take on 360 new students over the next four years.

Our fast-growing team is very united, committed to the mission, and hardworking, but we also maintain a relaxed and peaceful atmosphere that you’ll find everywhere in Madagascar.

Onja is located in Toamasina, a lively city with beautiful beaches, nice restaurants, and with plenty to do and see. Toamasina is Madagascar’s second largest city (population 300,000) yet is surrounded by plenty of natural beauty, and even has a national park nearby.

About the Analyst position

Onja Analysts/Data Scientists are at the core of our success and impact, allowing iterative improvements to key parts of our model to continuously increase our overall effectiveness and impact.

Your mission will be to analyse one or more parts of our organisation. Examples could be our student recruitment process, our English & software development courses, client attraction or hiring. Each of these are crucial and relate directly to our impact. From our successful first cohort of developers, we have a wealth of relevant data for analysis. You will be responsible for understanding the process, understanding the data, making key assumptions, applying statistical models to reveal strengths and areas for improvement, and reporting on your findings.

You will work very closely with the relevant team, our CEO and will probably have support in data processing, or data collection if required. We tend to strive for simplicity in our analysis and closely document our work so that others can clearly understand what we did. So far, we mostly use Python for our analysis. Being a startup, the role is fairly broad, and often goes beyond analysis, to working on or leading others to work on systems/tools.

We also wish to shape our organisation and processes not only to be effective but also to constantly experiment and collect relevant data to constantly improve.

Requirements

  • Background in Engineering, Science, Mathematics or related field
  • Ability to understand complex problems and reduce them to useful, meaningful components.
  • Programming knowledge
  • Experience with Python or at least a strong desire to learn and work with this language.
  • “Twelve month commitment (this ensures sufficient time to make a truly meaningful impact) with potential to renew/extend.
  • Excellent English communication skills

Start date

We are ready for you now, but generally allow for two to three months from the time the contract is signed.

How Onja Works

Onja is a social enterprise with a sustainable model:

  1. Search for brilliant minds who would otherwise be limited to low-paid, unfulfilling careers.
  2. Students receive two years of English and software development instruction.
  3. Graduates earn (and continue learning) at our outsourcing enterprise.
  4. All profits are used to train the next wave of students and the cycle begins again.