Nearly any US university entrepreneurship program would be envious of the recent success of students in the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST). In the past year, separate teams trained at in the program have scored significant attention for their work. MEST-graduate Saya Mobile placed as a ‘top seven’ finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. MEST’s mPawa was named one of the best startups at the regional DEMO conference, and scored an invite to the DEMO world finals in San Francisco. MEST alums Dropifi were named ‘Best IT Startup’ by the Kaufman Foundation’s Global Startup Open. Another MEST team, Retail Tower, was named one of only six solution providers for Amazon Product Ads worldwide. And the CEO of baked-at-MEST Nandimobile was invited to address the prestigious Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society in Paris. Stellar results, but here’s what’s even more impressive: MEST is only a five-year-old institution, the program admits a miniscule class of about 25 students a year, and it’s located in Accra, Ghana. Yes, this hotbed of global tech entrepreneurship is in sub-Saharan Africa.
MEST shows promise for one of the most hoped-for outcomes of globalization – the idea that technology can unleash brilliant minds across the planet, offering the opportunity to deliver previously constrained creativity and talent to markets worldwide. While a prior generation would open factories, the current generation opens laptops and competes on a global scale. Indeed, most of Retail Tower’s clients are from outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
MEST is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Jørn Lyseggen. A Norwegian adoptee of Korean descent with no prior ties to the continent, Lyseggen set the audacious, goal of building a program that would create world-class tech entrepreneurs from sub-Saharan Africa – teams that could go toe-to-toe with the best from anywhere. After a continental scouting mission, Lyseggen’s staff settled on Ghana, a nation with one of Africa’s strongest education systems and that is one of the continent’s most stable democracies. MEST students receive two years of training in technology and entrepreneurship. Best ideas from the graduating class pitch for admission to the MEST incubator, an accelerator program that comes with seed funding that can range from $30,000 to $200,000. All of the teams mentioned above are products of the MEST incubator. MEST is funded by a multi-million dollar grant from the Lyseggen-founded software firm, Meltwater Group, and its non-profit Meltwater foundation. Any proceeds from incubator investments will be plowed back into MEST – with hopes that funding for the organization will be self-sustaining from its continued success.
Over 500 students apply for each MEST cohort after they’ve completed their undergraduate degrees. The multi-stage admissions process involves aptitude tests and grueling interviews, with roughly 25 students accepted in each class. All students are brilliant, but 
not all arrive with geek chops. After two years, MEST students have gone through a heavy dose of startup tech that includes the LAMP stack, JavaScript, iOS and Android development, and more. A parallel track includes startup business training. Strategy development, sales skills, fund raising, and client development are all on the agenda. Courses are taught by experienced staff, mostly from abroad, supplementing with the increasingly large buffet of top-tier free online training. A fellows program brings in talented university grads from abroad (Boston College alum Kevin Schuster is a MEST fellow), and many MEST teams are partnered up with advocates and advisors attending top-tier business programs in West (Oxford, Stanford, and Duke are represented). During the week I visited, a Google veteran of the firm’s Sydney and Mountain View offices was on-leave from the firm, opening a multi-week MEST learning fire hose covering phone-to-back-end skills acquisition. MEST also hosts meetups in the best tradition of the Valley, Boston, and New York – Startup Weekend, hackathons, networking, and mentoring from the local business community, alumni, and abroad. Entrepreneurs, VCs, and academics fly in for regular ‘guest lecture weekends’. During my visit we Skyped in some of my former students for Q&A – funded veterans of TechStars and Summer@Highland. The pitches that I sat in on during my time speaking at MEST were as strong as anything we’d find in the Boston startup community, and the questions I was constantly peppered with showed a motivation, drive, and commitment to knowledge-acquisition that would be considered far right-side of the bell-curve in any state-side program. MEST is the real deal.
The MEST incubator is startup-central, located over a rope and plank bridge built by students with civil engineering training (see video on TechCrunch). The trip across does underscore that you’re not in the Kendall Square or Palo Alto – pigs squeal and roosters crow from a nearby property – but so much of what I saw at the MEST incubator was very familiar. Tables scattered around a room were filled with teams in scrum, discussing design, coding, site analytics, and customer acquisition. Desks were strewn with all manner of tech for development & QA testing: laptops (mostly Macs), iPhones, Androids, and feature phones. While I took notes, the sales lead from MEST firm adsBrook bounded over to where I was sitting and punched the dinner bell suspended above my head. He’d just racked up a sale that was one-third of the firm’s monthly quota. It was day one of the new period and the firm had already raised its quota 25% based on earlier success. The little chime almost flew off the wall. With performance like this, they’re going to need a bigger bell.
But while so much was familiar, I also got a genuine sense that MEST entrepreneurs realize they’re part of something bigger. Ghana, the world’s second fastest growing economy last year, has led most of its sub-Saharan neighbors in escaping the ‘poverty trap’ and was recently re-classified as a middle-income nation. MEST entrepreneurs seem to have something beyond founder’s passion. They realize that their success will play a key role in their country’s economic advancement. They are a first generation that will inspire a technical talent nexus, shining a bright light on new opportunities, and leading the way for Ghanaians sprinting into an era of rising prosperity.
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o be sure, Ghanaian entrepreneurs have a lot to overcome. The infrastructure in Accra isn’t keeping pace with economic advancement. High-speed Internet has arrived at MEST before piped in water and sewage (like many regions of the city, the latter services are trucked in daily). Power outages are frequent (a common occurrence in global tech hotspots like Bangalore) But MEST has backup generators, and software exists in the same cloud where you’ll find US-based startups. Another challenge is fighting bias against African firms – many from the US, when hearing of Africa and the Internet, think e-mail scams not potential partners. Students also face their own challenges. Entrepreneurship is relatively new to Ghana. Even though education, room, and board is funded by the program, students still postpone salaries for two years. And all balance risk/reward tradeoffs, recognizing that entrepreneurs anywhere fail more often than they succeed. Some MEST students struggle to convince family of the value of entrepreneurship, while the program’s talent pool is often raided by poachers from established firms. An evening alumni dinner showed MEST ties remain strong, even among those who choose not to complete the program.
While the US press is filled with predictions that the traditional university is doomed to be replaced by online offerings, I think MEST is more akin to what the future holds for a new era of business and technical education. Students work together, sharing 24/7 in ways that can only happen via a residency program. Exceptional classroom instruction is supplemented by classroom-flipping and learning-accelerating online offerings. And the program thinks beyond faculty for outside-the-classroom training from experts worldwide. Finally, all this is brought together with real-world projects that can result in launched, funded businesses. Yes, entrepreneurs can be trained, and the world should pay attention – they’re doing it at MEST in Accra and we can all learn from their efforts. For more on MEST, visit meltwater.org & follow @MESTghana on Twitter. I look forward to bringing a class of my own students to Ghana for a MEST visit in May.