When Vital Nsengiyumva was growing up in a small village in Rwanda in the 1990s, he didn’t always go to school. “I also grew up in the aftermath of genocide, and there was a lot of emotional stress,” he says. “Education was really like, you take it or leave it.” Many students also dropped out because they couldn’t afford school fees. Eventually, he ended up in a master’s program in Germany, and he started working as an engineer there.

In 2019, he signed up for a short MBA course on Udemy, the online learning platform. Chris Haroun, the instructor, was a former venture capitalist who originally developed the “MBA in One Day” class. A former VC and a Rwandan engineer joined forces to open the school, which teaches everything from computer science to welding.