There is a major shortage of software developers around the world. According to the Wall Street Journal, international tech companies are now discovering the African continent as an untapped source of tech talent. Last fall Tunga-founder Ernesto Spruyt was on the African Tech Roundup podcast to discuss these developments. And about the role of Tunga in helping to unlock Africa's tech talent potential. Here are six of the most outstanding quotes…
1. "There is a shortage of around 1 million ICT workers in the EU."
"According to the EU, there is a shortage of around 1 million ICT workers there. So, for a small company to have flexible access to software development at an affordable price is rather impossible. It is always a hassle to work with freelancers. You can never mobilize them at the moment that you need them. And they are generally very expensive.
So, my first goal with Tunga was to solve that. And the way I wanted to solve that was to circumvent all the problems that we experience with traditional freelancer marketplaces. There you find mostly one-off transactions. Every time you begin a new one to search for the talent that you need. The idea behind Tunga was to enable companies to find good developers and connect to them before they actually need them. So that you can build a social network. And when your network is robust enough, and you need somebody, then the chance that somebody is available when you actually need them is much bigger. That was the idea."
2. "Africa, in many fields, is ahead in terms of innovation."
"I have a background in development aid and working in Africa. As a result, I thought that it would be really great if we could find those developers in Africa. But at that moment, I didn't know whether there was a big enough community of developers in Africa. I just researched, and I was positively surprised about the developments. I found out that Africa, in many fields, is ahead in terms of innovation. Because you are just skipping generations of technology the West has been using."
"I came in contact with a Dutch design studio called Butterfly Works. They had been involved in an organisation called The Bits Academy, which is a curriculum for digital design. There are seven Bits schools in six countries in East Africa predominantly. And they had an Alumni community of around 6,000–7,000 alumni. Not all software developers, but a substantial part of them. That answered my question of whether there are enough developers on the continent. Yes, there are."
3. "The bottleneck is not coding skills, but what we call 'soft skills'."
"How can we tap this potential? This untapped potential that there is in the African continent? My experience is that there are already a lot of good people who can write good code in Africa. That's not the bottleneck from our perspective. From our perspective, the bottleneck is called 'soft skills'."
4. "Tunga is about using technology to bridge cultural differences."
"Suppose I have somebody from, let's say, Kampala. Who has never been outside of Uganda, who has never worked for western clients? How is this person going to learn to make a client happy who is from a different culture? And who has very specific demands in terms of how they want to run projects, how they want to run processes. So, the challenge is much more in bridging cultures. That is to say, into bridging communication differences and approaches to project management."
"We are working with medium-sized companies mostly. Especially those that have a significant budget for software development. They often have some experience with software outsourcing. And they are interested in a flexible layer around their core team."
5. "The key to success for African coders is to be able to understand the client's needs truly."
"For me, it's very much about creating common ground. Also, using technology and using the platform to help bridge the culture. And the differences in how they prefer to communicate, as opposed to taking the best practice from, let's say, the West and trying to impose it on people with a totally different background."
"Our advice to our developers is to hook up with other people in your own environment who have this experience. Organize meet-ups or visit meet-ups where you can meet those type of people. Because these people, they are the ones who can understand you and the client. In the end, this is about being able to understand the client."
6. "Andela and Tunga share the same goal but have different approaches."
"About Andela, I think it's a great initiative. We definitely play into the same trend and have similar missions, if you will. But our approach with Tunga is very different, so I would rather, from a market perspective, see us as complimentary than as competitive."
"If you compare Fiverr and Andela, they are both two ends of the spectrum. Andela caters for companies with big budgets. Fiverr is the bottom end — mostly one-off transactions with meager budgets. We are aiming for the middle market."
