The tech industry in Africa has seen tremendous growth over the years. We have seen the American company Andela set up shop in the continent to recruit developers. Google has an AI lab in the continent. Microsoft recently opened up an Africa Development Centre in Kenya and Nigeria. Amazon is scheduled to open an AWS region in South Africa in 2020. Clearly there is a lot of potential in this content. Developer hubs are all over the continent and recently ccHub bought Kenya’s own iHub.
This potential is shown by the ever expanding developer communities in Africa. One of the well known developer communities is Github and they have interesting stats about their community.
According to the Octoverse report by GitHub, Africa is doing quite well. Developers have created 40% more open source repositories than last year, which is a higher percentage growth than any other continent.
In the ‘larger developer communities’ in Africa (over 10K contributors), Morocco is the fastest growing African country with a 65% rise year on year. Kenya is second with 54% rise while Nigeria is third with 50%. These ‘larger developer countries’ in the continent saw a collective 70% increase in contributers year on year.
Kenya is also among the top regions where open source is growing. GitHub saw a 44% rise in open source projects by Kenyans, which ties the country in second with Iran. Nigeria leads this list with 59%.
African countries with less than 10K contributers has also seen a tremendous rise in the number of contributors. Mayotte leads with 638% increase, Guinea Bissau is next with a 550% increase while Seychelles is third with a 369% increase.
In general, 10 million new developers joined GitHub and collectively they have contributed to over 44 million repositories across the world. 80% of these developers are contributing from outside the US
