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Africa is on track to add $ 180 billion or 5.2% of its global GDP by 2025 thanks to the rapid growth of its internet economy, according to a report by the IFC of the World Bank and Google . In 2012, the continent’s internet economy (iGDP) was estimated at just $ 30 billion, or 1.1% of its GDP.
This year, the iGDP will contribute $ 115 billion, or 4.5% of a GDP of $ 2,554 billion, according to Accenture. In the United States, the internet economy contributed about 9% of GDP in 2018.
Key to growing an internet economy – which includes everything from banking and fintechs to agritech, e-health and venture capital – will be to develop the developer talent that builds the products and engines on which it operates. . Last year, the French-born CEO of Jumia, the pan-African e-commerce company, sparked outrage in African tech circles by suggesting that there weren’t enough African-based developers to meet the demands. business needs.
Women currently make up 21% of developers in African countries, compared to just 15% of junior developers in the United States.
The IFC / Google report indicates that there are nearly 700,000 professional developers across Africa with more than half in five African markets: Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa . This number is still relatively small compared to Africa’s 1.3 billion people – California alone has 630,000 developers while Latin America has 2.2 million.
But Africa’s developer talent is younger than that of more advanced economies, and the overall numbers on the continent are growing faster. Only a third of them receive their training at universities, instead more than half are either self-taught or pay for online school programs, a testament to the desire and broad ambition to acquire skills for future employment and entrepreneurship in countries with few existing formal jobs but also a shortage of digital skills.
It is easy to understand why young African students or recent graduates might choose to be self-taught or pay out of pocket for additional skills. The report notes, for example, that computer science courses at Kenyan universities still mainly teach C ++, “even though Java and Scala are the most demanded programming languages in the market.”
To date, a large portion of talented developers fall into the category of ‘junior developers’ which presents its own challenges, as Lagos-based Andela found out when he had to recruit more experienced talent to deliver clients. in the United States and other markets. In African countries with smaller and more nascent developer populations, 43% of developers have only one to three years of experience, compared to 22% in the United States.
The report says coding courses are driving the growth of software development training. Start-ups like Decagon (Nigeria), Gebeya (Ethiopia) and Moringa School (Kenya) have picked up where Andela left off by focusing on training young developers with flexible learning and bootcamp experiences.
Google itself rolled out a program in 2017 to train up to 100,000 developers over five years to help close the developer skills gap. Last year, Microsoft announced that it would spend more than $ 100 million on an Africa software development center initiative and that its first Africa development centers would open in Lagos and Nairobi.
Besides the rapid growth of the talent pool, another notable bright spot is that there has been what the report describes as “real traction” with the increase in the number of female developers in African markets, led by the Egypt, Morocco and South Africa. Women currently make up 21% of developers in African countries, compared to just 15% of junior developers in the United States.
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