Make the Case for Teaching Yoruba in Tech Bootcamps

Lagos is home to dozens of coding bootcamps, from Decagon to AltSchool to informal weekend programmes in Yaba and Surulere. Nearly all teach exclusively in English. For participants from Oyo, Osun, or Ekiti who moved to Lagos and whose strongest language is Yoruba, this creates a compounding problem: they are learning to code and learning technical English at the same time. Research from multilingual education contexts in East Africa and parts of India suggests that mother-tongue instruction in early technical training significantly improves retention and reduces dropout. But Nigerian edtech largely treats this as a settled question, defaulting to English without examining the tradeoff. Your task is to write a policy brief of 1,200 to 1,800 words addressed to a named bootcamp operator or to the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund, which funds digital skills training. The brief should make the case for piloting bilingual Yoruba-English instruction in one programme cohort, outline what the pilot would involve, and pre-empt the two strongest objections (likely: employer expectations, and the cost of producing bilingual materials). Good work will cite at least two real multilingual education studies, reference the actual labour market context in Lagos, and be specific enough that a programme manager could hand it to a curriculum team on Monday morning. A generic argument for mother-tongue education will not be enough.