About Qualify Africa

The problem we are working on

There is no shortage of opportunities open to Africans. What is missing is a way to tell which ones apply to you.

Most lists are written as articles. You open them all and read each one. Some exclude you on nationality. Some have closed. Some want a fee.

All that work falls on you. It falls hardest on people with the least time.

What we are trying to build

A list where every entry has been checked. We test the rules against your situation, so you do not have to. When the answer is no, we say so and say why.

We also show what an opportunity would cost you. A twelve-week full-time course is free to someone with no job. It is out of reach for someone who works seven days a week. Most lists treat those two people the same. We do not.

Why we started it

Qualify Africa began with a frustration I could not shake.

At Ighodalo Labs, the venture studio we are building in Nigeria, I was looking for opportunities for the founders working with me: grants, programmes, competitions, anything that could move their companies forward. What I discovered was how difficult it was, and how scattered the information is. The problem is not that Africa has no opportunities. The problem is that they are everywhere and nowhere at once. You find some on LinkedIn, some on X, some on organisation websites, some on scholarship pages. And the worst are the websites drowning in ads. Not just ads, but the kind of intrusive, unwanted ads I used to know as unsolicited messages from my years working with a telecoms company. Pop-ups on top of pop-ups. Finding one real opportunity felt like a test of endurance.

I consider myself a resilient person. I have a business network, and I spend my days around founders and programmes. Even so, there were opportunities I simply was not aware of. Again and again I would find one just as it was about to expire. For our own ventures we applied to about four opportunities, and we keep applying almost every day. More than once I looked at a deadline and thought: this has been open for months. How is it that nobody knows about it?

That question became a burden. I came home and talked it through with my wife. She loved the idea immediately and wanted to take it up, because she has lived this problem herself. She spent years searching for opportunities and we could not find the right ones for her. She went on to do a master's degree, and as she wraps it up she still struggles to find opportunities she can actually apply for. At first this was going to be a personal project, something to help her. Then we asked: why not build it for everyone? We are Africans, and we knew we were not the only ones in this situation.

It also speaks to the thing Ighodalo Labs exists to work on: economic dignity. Too many Africans do not know that there are opportunities meant for them. We are building ventures so that, in time, there are far more productive companies creating far more of those opportunities. But today, right now, there are already opportunities that many people qualify for and never hear about.

So Qualify does not only show the opportunities you qualify for today. It also shows the ones you are one step away from. Maybe there is a free course you can take to upskill. Maybe you just need to learn how to use AI tools to make your work stronger. To make sure it works for real people, we built more than a thousand test profiles, each one a different African in a different situation, and checked what each of them would see.

Success, for us, is simple. Every African opens their profile and sees one or two jobs, business opportunities or scholarships that apply directly to them. Not hundreds of listings they have to wade through to find the one that matters.

I know that pain personally. As a Nigerian, as an African, I have read job descriptions abroad, in the US and elsewhere, that I genuinely qualified for. You read it and think: this is perfect. You start the application. You are almost done. And only then do you see the line that says this role is open only to people in certain countries, or that you need an existing visa, or that there is no sponsorship. I have lost hours, sometimes a whole day, to an application only to learn that geography had ruled me out from the start. That is why Qualify exists: a platform for Africans where the things you see are the things you can actually apply for.

My wife leads Qualify Africa and is its face. She is deeply passionate about it, because it touches her life so closely. I am the engineer behind it. I do many things, and I could have handed the building to someone else, but I could not hand this one over. It is too dear to me, and I do not believe anyone could build it with the passion I bring to it. We are building it together.

Desmond, Ighodalo Labs

Who is behind it

Qualify Africa is a venture of Ighodalo Labs, a venture studio in Ibadan, Nigeria. The studio works on one problem: too many people have too few real choices.

Why it says Beta

Qualify Africa is in beta. It works, and every listing is checked before it appears, but it is not finished.

What that means for you: the list grows every day, so something you want may not be here yet. A listing can close or change after we check it, and we check again often. Some parts of the site will change as we learn what helps.

If something is wrong or missing, tell us. Every report gets read, and it makes the list better for the next person.

What it costs you

It is free, and there is no plan for that to change.

If Qualify Africa is funded later, it will be by organisations paying to reach people who qualify for what they run. That will be labelled, and it will never change who we show as eligible. The rules for that are public, on the page for organisations.

How you can help

We are still short of listings outside technology and business. Each one is opened on the organisation's own page and checked against four tests, as How we check describes. If you know of an opportunity that is not here, send it to us.

hello@qualifyafrica.com