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Raymond Oteba was unemployed with limited prospects in 2023. He had beginner-level Python programming skills and an undergraduate degree from a local university in Kenya, but he needed something more to launch his career.

Raymond knew about data science programs at traditional universities, but he faced two barriers: Cost and distance. He did not have money for tuition or the ability to study abroad. He was stuck.

“I only had passion and also ambition to learn,” he says. “And WorldQuant University built the foundation for me.”

Raymond enrolled in WQU’s Applied Data Science Lab, where he connected with classmates and faculty from all over the world. For one applied project, Raymond worked on a team that built financial models and predicted volatility in India using quantitative data. Today Raymond is a data scientist and software engineering consultant with European and U.S. clients.

“WorldQuant University taught me to think like a data scientist,” he says. “And that is to ask the right questions, to design experiments, and to validate models, while considering critical components like fairness in data.”

Raymond is not alone. WQU has educated more than 10,000 learners in 50 African countries. Together, they are driving impact across the continent.