Are you considering sourcing African software developers? Are you looking for reliable data on and insights in the African software development sector?
If so, this research article will provide you with plenty of background.
We cover a wide range of topics. For example, the level of African developer salaries. But also business climate, English proficiency and even the number of developers per software language per country.
Article overview
- Total number of software developers per African country
- – Absolute number of developers per African country
- – Relative number of developers per million population
- – % of population on LinkedIn per African country
- English proficiency levels across the African continent
- Salary levels for software developers in Africa
- – Range of salary levels from medium to high
- – Salary levels vs size of developer pool
- The African tech ecosystem
- – Business climate 2020 vs 2017
- – Proliferation of tech hubs in African countries
- – Innovation index 2020 vs 2018
- State of the ICT sector in African countries
- – Computer software spending
- – ICT services exports / outsourcing from Africa
- African software developer skills: languages and frameworks
- – Software language skills of African developers
- – Framework skills among African developers
- Conclusion: from frontrunners to late-bloomers
Total number of software developers per African country
In this section we look at the size of the tech talent pool in African countries. We have cross referenced data from LinkedIn, Github and a recent IFC report on the African internet economy. As a result, we have been able to make a fairly consistent estimation of the total number of software developers per African country.
The top-17 countries in terms of absolute number of developers represent more than 90% of the entire African IT talent pool. Therefore have further focused our analysis on these countries.
Absolute number of developers per African country
There are an estimated 690,000 professional software programmers in Africa. More than half of these are from South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria. The top-17 software development countries in Africa consists of:
- South Africa – 133,195
- Egypt – 125,270
- Nigeria – 114,536
- Kenya – 58,866
- Morocco – 49,818
- Tunisia – 45,247
- Ghana – 20,551
- Algeria – 20,530
- Uganda – 13,113
- Ethiopia – 8,316
- Senegal – 8,113
- Tanzania – 8,065
- Cameroon – 7,748
- Mauritius – 6,879
- Zimbabwe – 6,588
- Rwanda – 6,412
- Ivory Coast – 5,165
Relative number of developers per million population
Obviously, the absolute number of developers in a country doesn’t paint the whole picture. In this article we will create a more detailed overview for these countries. Firstly, we will add the ranking for the relative size of the tech talent pool per country. Here’s the ranking based on the number of developers per million population:
- Mauritius – 5,454
- Tunisia – 4,120
- South Africa – 2,234
- Morocco – 1,345
- Egypt – 1,224
- Kenya – 1,095
- Ghana – 661
- Rwanda – 610
- Senegal – 565
- Nigeria – 556
- Zimbabwe – 504
- Algeria – 477
- Cameroon – 353
- Uganda – 287
- Ivory Coast – 228
- Tanzania – 135
- Ethiopia – 72
Clearly, a small country like Mauritius has a thriving tech talent pool. In comparison, Nigeria has a huge developer pool but still a relatively modest one in comparison to the entire population size. When we plot both relative and absolute numbers, we get the following picture: