“We’re not just training coders. We’re preparing young Africans to compete at the highest level anywhere in the world.”

To execute this vision, Senior Program Manager Jerry Uke designed a rigorous, transformative 52-week experience. He focused on creating a complete learning journey where real-world discipline was paramount.

“We wanted a one-year program where ambition meets discipline, mentorship meets community, and talent grows through real projects,” Uke explained.

The initial screening was intense: out of over 4,000 applications, only 30 fellows were selected for Cohort 1. Over the course of the year, they navigated 400+ live sessions and completed over 50 projects, internalizing the principle that engineering is a rigorous craft dedicated to solving real problems.

The Mentor and the Methods

At the core of the backend track, instructor Rufai Mustapha, gobal talent builder, was the central force helping to turn raw global talent into capable engineers.

“Many junior engineers start with gaps in the basics,” Rufai noted. “Our goal was to give them a strong foundation, guide them through real projects, and help them gain the confidence to deliver value anywhere in the world.”

Rufai worked closely with 12 fellows, immersing them in the realities of production engineering: weekly one-on-one sessions on architecture and debugging, regular standups, and project-based learning focused on critical sectors like fintech, AI, and cloud systems.

The Evidence: Backend Track Fellow Spotlights

The true measure of the program lies in the hands of these individuals, the first wave of talent ready to define the future. Their stories are a testament to transformation and mastery in areas like Microservices Architecture, Security, and CI/CD.

Wemi Moyela: Making The Internet Fun Again

Wemi grew up exploring the world through the internet and was inspired by the possibilities it created for creativity and play.

As a Rise fellow, he strengthened his engineering foundations, learned to reason from first principles, and developed core competencies in distributed systems, observability, and production reliability. 

His final project, Moonfly, is a competitive fantasy investment game where players trade assets like stocks, crypto, and currencies against each other to experiment with markets without financial risk. He thinks the internet needs more things that are both genuinely useful and genuinely fun.

Adedamola Toye: The Social Impact Engineer

Adedamola rose from a foundational level of preparedness to architect AnonAlert, an anonymous crime-reporting platform with deep security implications. This project required mastering NestJS, Docker, and Kafka, proving he can engineer solutions with profound social impact.

Chukwuebuka Obiora: The Architect of Scale

Chukwuebuka speaks the language of high-performance systems. His capstone was a hotel booking platform with Microservices from the ground up. He engineered high-availability APIs and successfully integrated the Paystack API, showcasing his ability to manage complex, revenue-driven systems.

Tiffany Ugwunebo: The Leader & Builder

Tiffany transformed into a proven leader, securing a role at Applai Grants and building Pixel Hive, a sophisticated asynchronous multimedia processing service. 

She develops applications that integrate a wide range of external APIs, including GPT-4.1, the Hugging Face API, Stripe API, RapidAPI, and others.

Her work leverages queue-based architectures, Docker-powered deployments, microservices, and real-time communication using GraphQL. 

She is also highly proficient with JavaScript frameworks such as Hono, Express, NestJS, and React. Recognizing her “knack for sprint planning, division of labour and leadership,” she’s already set her sights on a future CTO role.  

Oluwafemi Ojuri: The Pragmatic Problem-Solver

Oluwafemi is an enthusiastic engineer who enjoys building software to solve problems, with careful focus on optimization. He started the cohort highly prepared and is exceptionally resourceful. 

His capstone project, Next-Fit, is a tool he built to scrape career pages, turning a personal need into a powerful application.  With techniques learnt during the program, he also built an AI-powered CBT system capable of assessing open-ended/theory questions for his final-year project.

Festus Idowu: The Prolific Shipper

Festus joined as a frontend dev seeking to master backend engineering and evolved as a systems-focused engineer building solutions across the stack. 

During the program, he launched AlgoX, a simplified data structures and algorithms learning platform currently serving 40 users, he developed Medisphere, a healthcare platform connecting patients with providers giving patients access and control over their data, and dp2png – a peer-to-peer payment platform for Nigerians to deposit and withdraw their Deriv funds. 

Through these projects, Festus learned system design, advanced data structures and algorithms, site reliability engineering practices, progressing from basic backend concepts to building systems.

Olalekan Ogundele: The Visionary Craftsman

Olalekan began with the goal of building for millions. His project, an “intelligent sales and customer engagement platform,” demonstrates his application of “system thinking, scalability principles and clean architecture.”

The Legacy of Growth and The Road Ahead

The program’s impact was swift and undeniable. One student, for example, secured a Meta internship before even finishing the program.

“Before Rise, I worked alone,” one student reflected. “Now I collaborate, get feedback, and build confidence. I did not think I could do this project, but I did.”

The academy proved that top-tier talent is here. As Cohort 2 expands to 100 fellows, adding design and cybersecurity tracks, the foundational goal holds fast.

“People do not have to work for Rise,” says Eke Urum. “They go anywhere, earn more, and deliver value. Rufai makes sure they are ready.”

Speaking on the spirit of developing global talent, Rufai Mustapha explained:

“I have had the privilege of mentoring this incredible cohort, and I am constantly amazed by their brilliance. Each one has a unique spark and the ability to build things that will change the world. I cannot wait for the world to see all the amazing things they can do.”

Google’s research also revealed the top trending questions being asked about AI across Nigeria. Here, Olumide Balogun, Google West Africa Director, answers some of the top most frequently asked questions:

What is Artificial Intelligence and how does it work? 

AI is a type of technology that can learn from its environment, experiences and people, and that can understand patterns and make projections better than any previous technology before it.

AI models are trained and created by human engineers, who input data into the AI system to train it. For example, in 2012, we showed an AI model thousands of videos of cats on YouTube, so that it could learn to recognize a cat.

Now, with advancements in technology, we could give an AI model hundreds of books on animals to read – and, using those, it would be able to describe a cat to us on its own despite having never been shown one.

Once AI systems are trained, they’re tested to see if they work well. You can do this by asking the AI model to describe or recognise a cat, for example, or even to generate a picture of one for you. Training AI models can take a long time – but once they work, they can be deployed into production so that you can use them at home.

When did AI start?

AI can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Alan Turing – a British mathematician – published a paper on “computing machinery and intelligence”. That kick-started the principles behind AI – but the first time anyone used the term was likely in 1956, when John McCarthy hosted a conference at Dartmouth College called the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence.

So AI is not new – in fact, AI research has been accelerating since the 1990s. Google itself became an AI-first company back in 2015.

But the pace of AI development is accelerating – with more households able to access generative AI tools like text-to-image generators or chatbots – which has made AI a household phrase for maybe the first time ever.

Where is AI used?

AI has always been integral to many daily tools, from Google Translate to antilock braking in cars. Its transformative power, however, is being harnessed more profoundly now. In the heart of this evolution is the Google AI centre in Accra, laser-focused on Africa’s unique challenges and aspirations.

While innovations like Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold impact global biotech, in Africa, we’re taking strides that resonate with local needs. We’re collaborating to map remote buildings for better planning, using AI to predict challenges like locust outbreaks, and enhancing maternal health via AI-powered ultrasound.

AI’s potential in sustainability is vast.

In Africa, it’s about thriving industries that respect our rich biodiversity. While the global health community benefits from protein sequence mapping, for Africa, it’s a hope against diseases like malaria.

What can AI do and how can I use it? 

Think of AI as a tool that’s really good at understanding patterns and making projections – better than any computer has been before – and that’s been taught to learn from its environment, experiences and people. When you put that ability to good use, you can use AI to do all sorts of amazing things: like helping doctors to screen for and identify cancer, predicting and monitoring natural disasters, or helping businesses to identify and reduce their carbon emissions.

You’re probably using AI all the time already, without realising. But you can now also use AI to help boost your productivity with experimental language tools like Bard; to translate even more languages on Google Translate; or to find the most fuel efficient route on Google Maps.

Is AI dangerous?

AI is like any other technology in that it can be used for good or bad, depending on the user. On the one hand, it has incredible potential to be used in ways that are beneficial for society – whether it’s protecting people from spam and fraud, translating hundreds more languages, or forecasting floods up to seven days in advance. But it can also be used to amplify current societal issues – like misinformation and discrimination.

It’s really important that we get these tools right, working together to ensure we’re creating and using them responsibly.

That means governments introducing regulation to help us seize the benefits of AI while mitigating the risks, as well as companies developing shared sets of standards and principles.

At Google, we’re also led by our own AI Principles – which you can read online – to make sure we’re developing AI that is beneficial for society.

Will AI take my job?

As technology has developed, so too has the job market. At the beginning of the last century, people mostly worked in agriculture. Now we have hedge fund managers, cabin crews aboard widely-accessible commercial flights – and, as recently as 1995, web designers. So we’ve had these questions for a long time and, as a society, we’ve navigated them well.

That’s not to underestimate the potential of AI – which is essentially the ‘third wave’ of digital technology after the internet and mobile phones. It will be brilliant for people’s productivity and for economic opportunity – but it will also cause some levels of disruption. We’ll see a whole set of jobs that can grow – but the most profound change will be how many of our jobs will be assisted by technologies.

AI will become a partner to many of us, helping us not just to make the repetitive tasks of our work more efficient, but sparking creativity and enabling us to spend more time on the bits of our jobs that we love and that challenge us.

We’re already working with people to help them learn how AI can help them. Our Grow with Google programs have trained 7 million people and helped to close the digital skills gap in Africa.

Governments, NGOs and the private sector can work together to bring similar schemes about – ensuring that everyone can benefit from AI.