Young Developers And Designers! You May Want To Sign Up For This Internship Programme

The HNG program is a 3-month remote-internship where interns get to work on real-world software projects. You may have heard of the program but what you may not know is that Zimbabweans and other Africans can now apply for the internship.

So let’s talk about why this is a big deal and how you can enter the internship…

HNG’s program began as an incentive to attract more people to development in Nigeria. They believe interns may be passionate  but they often lack basic infrastructure and their program has gone a long way to

The internship is in its 4^th phase and this will be running from the 1^st of May to the 28^th of July. The first internship was in 2016 and a total of 170 interns were trained with 15 finalists at the end of the program. The second internship took place in January of 2017 and this time the number had ballooned to 848 interns and 30 finalists. 2017’s internship program was hosted twice and in August the third session began and over 1 100 aspiring developers and designers signed, whilst this time around there were 100 finalists.

As noted above, the previous 3 internships had been open only to Nigerians but thankfully the fourth edition is Pan-African, so everyone in Africa is free to join this time around. This will probably mean there will be many more people signing up and more finalists.

How do you enter?

The way the internship is structured is quite interesting actually. There’s NO entrance exam anyone who is interested just signs up and is inducted. Because the internship is hosted online there is no problem with having high numbers of interns and the numbers are trimmed down pretty easily as the internship progresses.

You may be wondering how the numbers are reduced. Well, HNG creates ‘exciting challenges’ on their slack channel every week and those who can solve the challenges get to keep their jobs.

What’s in it for the interns?

Interns get paid $20 on a weekly basis, so you get to gain experience, learn and earn all at the same time. Apart from the fact that interns are obviously paid for the work they are doing, the other reason they have been getting paid is for them to be able to also pay minor bills such as electricity or saving up to get equipment to help them better in their craft.

All this from the comfort of your home, or wherever you are doing the internship from. If you are an aspiring developer/designer or you know someone interested in this field you might want to check this out.

[Update]: Interested developers can no longer sign up for the program as the deadline has now expired. If you are interested you will have to wait for the next internship. Stay tuned for that…