[🇺🇸/EN] Catching You Up on 2024–2025

After five years of continuous programming — from our 2018 pilot through the 2023 Data Science Fellowship — 2024 became a natural point to pause, take stock, and define where we wanted to go next. Here's what that looked like.

A Moment for Introspection

Five years of running programs as a nonprofit taught us a lot — including where the model itself had limits. Delivering advanced technical training well, and sustaining the funding to keep delivering it, turned out to be two different jobs that don't always fit inside one structure. Rather than keep pushing the same model harder, we took the time to genuinely reconsider it: what had worked, what hadn't, and what a more resilient version of Adei Institute could look like going forward. That reflection is what led us toward the hybrid structure we're building today: our mission to drive socioeconomic development through technology in West and Francophone Africa could best be supported by a resilient, revenue-generating commercial arm — rather than depending on grant funding alone.

Choosing What to Fix First

Early in 2024, we launched three initiatives at once: piloting an Adei Tech Hub Network of regional partner hubs, an outreach campaign to recruit a new Board of Directors, and a comprehensive financial audit needed to meet the due-diligence standards funders expect.

The Tech Hub Network pilot worked better than we expected. Outreach identified five-plus interested partner hubs across the region — and several of them independently asked us for technical training delivery, without us bringing it up first. That's real, unprompted validation that our program model travels beyond Abidjan.

But by the middle of the year, we made a deliberate call: pause the Tech Hub Network and board-recruitment work, and put everything into the financial audit. Growing a network and building institutional governance both matter — but neither matters if the underlying financial foundation isn't solid first.

A New Home

In the second half of 2024, leadership relocated primarily to Côte d'Ivoire. We closed our original tech hub/center in Cocody Centre (where we also operated a co-working space) and moved into a new office space in Deux-Plateaux Vallon, Abidjan that perfectly accommodates our office and training space needs!

What was the trade-off? A larger-capacity training room and vast outdoor event space, for a location off a main street, lower maintenance costs, and the ability to focus on our core business.

Once settled, we spent roughly six months bringing our Côte d'Ivoire entity's fiscal and administrative records fully current — unglamorous work, but the exact work that makes everything else (grant eligibility, accreditation, partnerships) possible.

Closing the Loop

That was extended by a roughly ten-month FDFP accreditation renewal process (including an excruciating administrative verification process), finally delivered in January 2026 — formally re-establishing employer training-cost reimbursement pathways for our corporate clients in Côte d'Ivoire, and setting up everything that comes next.

A Good Reset

At the end of 2025, Odomitchi attended Opportunity Collaboration (OC2025) in Albufeira, Portugal — a 4-night, 3-day unconference connecting social entrepreneurs and change-makers, with no formal panels or slide presentations, built instead around small-group leadership circles and peer discussions addressing each participant's most pressing challenges. It was a good reset, and well-timed to validate the direction we'd landed on. New relationships came out of it, including a promising opening for our fiscal sponsorship product — more on that as it develops.

More on what "next" looks like in our following post.