Bringing Real Open-Source Experience to Nigerian Students: Announcing CodeDay Labs Nigeria

CodeDay Labs is coming to Nigeria. Our first cohort outside the United States runs from June 29th to August 21st, and applications are open now!

Why Nigeria, why now

If you have spent any time around the Nigerian tech scene over the last few years, you have probably noticed the same thing we have. The talent is here. The motivation is here. What is missing for a lot of students is not skill or ambition, it is the experience of working on a real production codebase alongside engineers from around the world. Tutorials and bootcamps can only take you so far. At some point, you have to work on code somebody else wrote, for a project somebody else owns, with people who have opinions about how it should be done.

Open source is the most direct answer to that gap we know of. When you contribute to an open-source project, you are doing the same work professional engineers do every day. The same tools, the same review process, the same kinds of feedback. Nobody is grading you on a curve. A maintainer either merges your pull request or asks you to change it, and that conversation is where the real learning happens. It is also, not coincidentally, exactly how every engineering team you might ever join actually operates.

What CodeDay Labs is

CodeDay Labs is built around that idea. Each cohort, we take students and place them in small teams. Every team gets matched to an open-source issue from one of our partner projects. Real work, real maintainers, real users on the other end. Every team also gets two people in their corner. The first is a mentor, an industry engineer whose job is to help students think through how to approach a problem, how to read a codebase they did not write, how to ask the right questions. The second is a Consulting Software Engineer (CSE), , who helps with the day-to-day debugging and the kind of “why is my dev environment broken at 2am” support that actually unblocks people.

Over eight weeks, students read the codebase, figure out what the maintainer actually wants, scope the work, write the code, go through a real PR review, and ship something. At the end, what they walk away with is not a certificate. It is a contribution with their name on it, in a project they did not own, that real people use. That is a portfolio piece nobody can take from them, and more importantly, it is the muscle memory of how professional engineering teams actually work.

A track record

CodeDay has been doing this work for a while. Since 2009, we’ve helped over 75,000 students get excited about code and start using technology and creativity to solve meaningful problems. Since launching CodeDay Labs in 2020, we’ve helped over 4,000 students make their first contributions to open source. We currently partner with 20 open-source organizations, and our students have shipped contributions to more than 50 different projects.

The outcomes are what we are most proud of. Around 40% of our alumni go on to become long-term open-source contributors, the people who keep showing up to projects long after the program ends. Our alumni are also more likely to land global software engineering roles, and the ones who do tend to reach mid-level positions two to three times faster than their peers. More info in our peer-reviewed publications: [1] [2] [3] [4].

In 2026, the Community College Baccalaureate Association in the US recognized our open-source internship model as one of its Promising Practices for high-quality education.

The Nigeria pilot

This first Nigerian cohort runs for eight weeks, fully remote. It is open to any student in Nigeria interested in software engineering, and prior open-source experience is not required. If you can write code in any language and you are willing to put in the time, you can apply.

None of this would be happening without Shalom Gar, longtime CodeDay Labs mentor and community leader in Nigeria who has taken on the work of getting this pilot off the ground in Nigeria. Shalom is helping us find both students and mentors on the ground, and a lot of the trust we are building with the local community comes through him.

How to get involved

If you are a student in Nigeria, apply for the cohort here

If you are an engineer based in Nigeria with a few years of experience and you want to mentor a team, fill out our mentor signup form. We are actively recruiting for this cohort.

If you run or maintain an open-source project and you want to host student contributors, we would love to talk. More details: https://labs.codeday.org/oss.

Closing

A lot of the open-source software the world runs on was written somewhere else, by someone else. The next wave of maintainers, the people who will own and shape the projects we will all be depending on in ten years, is going to come from up-and-coming tech hubs across the world, not silicon valley. CodeDay is excited to be part of this movement and we can’t wait to see what this cohort builds!