
Where are the African programmers? - nadjetey
http://nadjetey.github.io/2014/06/where-are-the-african-coders/
======
Nanzikambe
African programmer here, and left the country I was born in decades ago to
find somewhere that had a demand for my skills.

You'll find there's a direct correlation between available jobs for a career
and people qualified or qualifying for that career that remain there. The only
places in Sub-Saharan Africa that need programmers are of the scale where they
have a regional head office elsewhere in the region (ie. South Africa, where
they centralise support services like IT, development, analysis etc.)

Combined with the fact that the power houses of development in Africa are
about as immigration friendly to other Africans as some of them would have
been to people by virtue skin colour not so long ago. To clarify, "African
from a poor African nation" is the new black in South Africa/Namibia/Botswana
I can't speak for anywhere in Central or Northern Africa as I've not tried
them.

~~~
nashequilibrium
Mark Shuttleworth - Ubuntu Creator South African & sold Thawte to Verisign in
the dotcom boom.

Elon Musk - South African, of paypal & spacex

Roelof Botha - South African, of paypal & Sequoia

Emanuel Derman - South African, of Goldman Sachs Quantitative strategies

Amazon Web Services - South Africa

Herman Chinery-Hesse - Ghana, of SOFTtribe

OffTopic - J. R. R. Tolkien - South African, Lord of the Rings

There is a lot more where that came from:
[http://ventureburn.com/2014/03/20-kickass-african-tech-
entre...](http://ventureburn.com/2014/03/20-kickass-african-tech-
entrepreneurs-worth-your-time/)

You could go to a lot of the Compsci departments at many Universities in
African countries and find a lot of good developers or potentially good devs.
This is where Accenture , microsoft etc, get their devs from in Africa.

EDIT: PLZ downvote this post, my challenge to u guys is to make my Karma go to
zero! You can do it guys.

~~~
SeoxyS
Mark Shuttleworth: white, British descent,

Elon Musk: white, Canadian/British descent,

Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black (AWS): white,

Emanuel Derman: white,

J. R. R. Tolkien: white, British descent.

\---

I'm not trying to say anything about race. But many of the examples you
pointed out seemed to be of people of non-african descent. I don't think your
examples say much about Africans in tech so much as it says something about
people in positions of privilege having the opportunity to found companies.

I say this as a one-time white-foreigner living in South Africa, where I spent
four years.

~~~
kabouseng
Having lived in South Africa, you will also know that South Africa houses an
indigenous white population that has settled in the country ~ 400 years ago,
roughly the same time that Europeans settled in America, and also the same
time that the black tribes also migrated and arrived in South Africa (Zulu's,
Xhosa's, Sotho's etc.)

But now for some reason "African" refers to only black people, and white
Africans are priviledged and not worthy of mention. Would you follow that same
logic for Americans?

*For technical correctness the Khoi-San settled in South Africa ~2000 years ago, but is a minority population in South Africa.

~~~
mattlutze
For what it's worth, the original title was asking where all the African
developers are, and the top threads all so far talk about South Africa.

We're particularly myopic in the Northern Hemisphere when it comes to Africa,
often seeing the Mediterranean coast and South Africa and skipping that middle
part...

So while it truly is interesting to hear that there's a solid development
community in South Africa, it doesn't speak to the larger question on why we
see so little coming from the rest of the continent.

~~~
klaasvakie
I can't really speak for anything north of the equator, but I have travelled
fairly extensively in the southern half of Africa.

The impression I get as a visitor to many of these countries is that except
for a few big cities it is just too difficult to guarantee power and telecoms
access to bet your job on it.

Most people will find a job locally doing "boring" software since there is
less risk. Working remotely for a company in the US/Europe requires them to
understand your (african) problems which is always difficult.

If I am at the office and we have no power, my boss understands; If I am
remote-working, will my "American/European" boss understand why I just lost a
day?

The advantage of staying here (in SA) means that even if you are doing boring
software, your salary is probably good enough to give you spectacular buying
power compared to 99% of the planet.

As you move to more remote places, the salaries just keep increasing. I was
recently looking at a job in Tete (Northern Mozambique) which paid around
USD450k p.a.

So, I guess that doesn't really answer your question, but I think Africa is
quiet mostly because the "boring" jobs pay disproportionately well --- the
incentive to be an entrepreneur is mostly gone. (I say this as someone working
at a startup of sorts)

~~~
nabrielah
I'm _extremely_ interested in working somewhere remote/strange in Africa/other
underdeveloped areas of the world (not even looking for anything notably well
paying). I've tried a couple of times to search for relevant job boards and
the like but haven't been able to find anything halfway decent. If you could
go into a bit more detail about where one would look for that sort of
thing/what the typical process is in that part of the world or shoot me an
email at public at disastero.us, I would be tremendously grateful.

Thanks!

Edit: The bigger the shithole the better, really. I've been trying to find a
method for searching for jobs in adverse environments for a while, but haven't
been in any way successful.

~~~
klaasvakie
So if you want to move somewhere off the beaten track your job choices are
going to be:

1) Mining 2) Power/Electricity 3) Support for the above.

Most companies don't hire in the countries they operate in, since the skills
just don't exist. Most sites are populated by a mix of European/South
African/Indian expats who are there for a limited period (typically < 5 years)

The way to get into these types of jobs is to get hired by the European or
South African companies that operate in these areas, and then ask for
placement at your shithole of choice. The current rule of thumb is to ask for
your SA salary * 4 or * 5 depending on how bad the place actually is.

At the moment there is is a lot of activity in Northen Zambia (copper) with
companies like Yokogawa/Siemens/ABB looking for people.

Northern Mozambique is pretty active (coal/gas) with Vale/Jindal being the
major mining houses and ABB/Siemens etc. providing the tech.

On the power generation side - South Africa has quite a lot of activity on the
renewable side with Spanish and Danish companies taking the lead (Abengoa for
solar esp.)

There is currently also a bit of a power generation boom in Ghana and Benin,
but I don't know anyone directly involved.

Most of the work is in hardware, project management, or process control
though. It is going to be much harder to find software only work.

EDIT: I forgot to mention - there might be more opportunity for software only
work in banking. I know Barclays is currently busy with a big push up into
Africa, but I am not very familiar with that industry.

------
tribaal
I moved to Tanzania recently (I'm a white western programmer with a remote
job).

Some of the hurdles you have to jump over to become a professional programmer
here:

\- Have access to a computer (several months, sometimes years, of salary).
Obviously.

\- Have access to reliable power. I have 6+ hours power cuts almost daily here
(and I'm in a rich town - not in the bush). Being a western Engineer, I could
afford to build my own power backup system, but I'm the exception.

\- Have access to the internet. Sure, I can afford broadband here, but at 60$+
a month, it's _way_ out of reach for most people. Mobile is acccessible-ish,
but most providers won't let you tether a computer (or charge through the roof
for it).

\- Read English well enough to understand online material. The corollary being
that your family has to be rich enough to afford to send you to school (that
is, primary and high-school. I'm not even talking about university here).

\- Last but not least, actually learn programming (I met many westerners
without any of the previous problems that fail utterly).

Once you pass all these, you still have to find a job, and that's not easy.
Basically, some ISPs, some telco jobs, and very few regional things (web
agencies etc...).

I hope working from home / remoting will continue to become more widespread -
some very good programmers here are looking for jobs, and would love to stay.

Oh, and most of Africa shares timezones with Europe, too.

------
yummyfajitas
There are many African programmers here in India (Pune at least, I hear
similar things about Delhi). The general trajectory seems to be study here
because schools at home are a disaster, then move to the west because the east
is too racist.

Nearly every single one wishes they could find a good job at home.

(Let me emphasize that this is all secondhand knowledge. The only racist
behavior I've observed has been a Russian making a "jungle fever" type comment
to me, plus standard "rip off the foreigner" stuff.)

~~~
markdown
I was in a hostel with some africans (Tanzania/Kenya) in Hyderabad studying
CompSci under ICCR (Indian Govt) Scholarships about a decade ago. Great guys,
very sharp. Lost touch over the years.

------
xtrumanx
> Yet, for some strange reason, these people are virtually ghosts on the
> Internet.

That's not very strange in my opinion. Scott Hanselman spoke of Dark Matter
Developers* who are the "Unseen 99%" who don't blog, tweet or attend
conferences.

* [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx)

~~~
tribaal
Also, attending conferences in "Africa" (such a big and diverse continent
lumped together) is completely unpractical except for some edge cases: many
flights will go to Europe and back (there is very little internal demand).

The price of such a flight is obviously also a problem.

------
mhogomchungu
African programmer here from Tanzania and one of my FOSS project is
zuluCrypt[1]

[1]
[https://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/](https://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/)

~~~
tribaal
Hey cool!

What part of Tanzania are you from? Moshi here :)

~~~
mhogomchungu
Dar Es Salaam. I noticed in your other comment you said you moved to Tanzania
recently, how is your Swahili :-)

Let see if you can derive meaning from the following swahili question.

Kati ya nchi zote ulizokuwa na uwezo wa kuhamia,kwanini uliichagua Tanzania?

If the above went over your head,i asked, "of all the countries you could have
migrated to,why did you pick Tanzania?"

~~~
tribaal
Ninajifunza kiswahili pole pole :) (Your question did go over my head, but it
did allow me to learn many new words :) Asante sana!)

My wife and I chose Tanzania for various reasons, including:

\- We knew Moshi from some years ago (we climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro), and have
sentimental attachment to the place (I asked my wife on Uhuru peak).

\- We knew our son (1 year old) would be safe (good medical care, few
mosquitoes and nasty animals, varied food). He made friends with our
neighbourhood kids pretty fast :)

\- She had some connections with a local NGO and so could work as a volunteer
here.

\- We remembered Tanzanians to be the most welcoming and friendly people we've
ever met (and we had the chance to travel a lot). We were wrong BTW,
Tanzanians are even more welcoming than we remembered :)

\- Kiswahili is a challenge to learn, but we like learning new languages (we
take lessons bi-weekly)

\- It's much more attractive than most places for our family to visit during
their vacation ;)

\- I always echoed Mark Shuttleworth's sentiment that "Africa is the future",
and I decided to put my actions where my mouth is :p

I could go on for a long time, we really like it here.

------
Eduard
There is an interesting crowdfunding campaign for a documentation going on
right now which will provide insights into this topic:
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/africahacktrip-the-
movie](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/africahacktrip-the-movie)

~~~
Nanzikambe
That project is definitely cool enough to warrant it's own post! Why haven't I
heard of this before?

------
twoSeats
Well I'm disappointed to not see a bunch more people promoting their local
tech hubs, dev communities and such if they have them. Zambia has the people
over at -> [http://bongohive.co.zm](http://bongohive.co.zm) and a few more
that aren't involved with that hub.

I know I have many "dark matter" programmers as friends. A lot of Africa in my
experience as tribaal pointed out has a great many hurdles that need to be
overcome in order to be a programmer. For example I have to pay the same price
he does for internet access, US$60 and it's only a 512k line. Worse, service
has been so bad lately I'm lucky to have more than an hour of stable uptime at
a time at an average of 10kb/s.

~~~
christogreeff
[http://www.siliconcape.com/](http://www.siliconcape.com/)

------
gagabity
We are here!(Tanzania) Mostly working in sh __y demoralizing banking IT
departments. I have began looking into immigrating probably to Canada or
Australia due to their immigration policies.

~~~
tribaal
Yay!

Many more Tanzanian programmers than I expected on this thread!

Out of curiosity - what kind of technologies do you use during your day job?
Is it a typical choice for the banking industry in Tanzania, in your
experience?

~~~
gagabity
For my day job I use mostly SQL Server and a beast of an application which is
written in VB and C#.Net by some developers in another country, I am only
allowed to touch the configuration and scripting layer (C#) on this one and
the thousands of configuration options it contains. But I do mostly Android in
my spare time if I have the energy.

~~~
tribaal
Pole sana.

I hope the android "app" concept catches on as adoption increases - I'd love
to see the same kind of local intelligence applications as in Europe here!

I find buying things intelligently is hard here for example, since the
knowledge of where things are at what price is not transparent (you must know
people).

~~~
thebenedict
Habari, American new to TZ (but not E. Africa) here. Is there much of a tech
community around? I stopped by Kinu and Buni. Both seem nice but sparse...

~~~
gagabity
There is also [http://www.teknohama.or.tz/](http://www.teknohama.or.tz/).
Their events seem to be geared mostly toward beginners and not to people
already in tech. A lot of the events are organized at awkward times for
someone with a 9-5, participants are also very young, I'm 31 and was probably
the oldest at one of the Samsung events that was held at Kinu. This is not
necessarily a bad thing though.

------
elinchrome
I follow some African programmers on twitter. They aren't totally unheard of.
I suspect most emigrate to Europe or America to find work, and no longer
identify as African Programmers.

~~~
Nanzikambe
A fair point, but as an African that emigrated and is naturalised, I still
identify myself as very much African as opposed to anything else. I suspect
most Africans have very strong identities in that respect, but I can only
speak for myself.

~~~
elinchrome
I used identify in the outward sense, not the inward. I.e. in a tag-line on
twitter one wouldn't have "A rails developer in Mombasa," if they were really
in Antwerp.

------
abenga
The dev environment in Africa (at least in Nairobi, where I live) is growing
quite quickly. Co-working spaces (mostly with attached incubators) like the
iHub[1], 88mph[2], etc. are extremely vibrant spaces. In the iHub, we have
frequent talks by prominent figures from the technology community (Larry Wall,
Marissa Mayer, and Eric Schmidt are some of the ones I knew about). IBM
research opened an office in Nairobi, and I hear they're recruiting Kenyan
programmers.

[1] [http://www.ihub.co.ke/](http://www.ihub.co.ke/)

[2] [http://www.88mph.ac/](http://www.88mph.ac/)

Edit: Fixed links.

------
ForHackernews
For what it's worth, Rwanda is attempting to become a local tech hub:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_next_silicon_va...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_next_silicon_valley/2013/12/rwanda_s_high_tech_future_20_years_after_genocide_the_nation_aspires_to.html)

------
jacquesm
If you're an African programmer, or even a programmer living in some country
where you do have internet access but little or no local market: _Please_
apply next time the 'who wants to be hired' thread rolls around. It's in my
opinion one of the most direct ways in which HN can help you improve your
situation, either by being noticed and to get hired remotely or by giving you
a ticket out. Though the latter is a nice example of brain drain and
evaporative cooling in action it is at the same time a very clear and direct
way to get you into a substantially different situation. What you do if/when
you get employed is up to you, I know plenty of stories of people that went
abroad, made some money and then somehow found a way to leverage that into
improving the situation for a whole slew of people back home. So I'm not
adverse to this at all, in fact I think it is a good thing, it sure beats
being unemployed.

------
incision
Okal Otieno [1], creator of hackershelf.com [2] a site I discovered on HN and
get all kinds of value from.

1: [http://justokal.com/](http://justokal.com/)

2: [http://hackershelf.com/browse/](http://hackershelf.com/browse/)

------
JacobiX
Africa is a large heterogeneous continent ... I'm a software developer from
north Africa (Tunisia). You can find here some regular white-collar jobs. But
the startups scene is nonexistent.

------
okal
"Where are the Ghanaian Programmers" would have been a more appropriate title.
I'm Kenyan. Articles like these presume we're operating within the same market
conditions when nothing could be further from the truth. The disclaimer in the
first paragraph seems to acknowledge this, but talking about "African
programmers" is neither useful nor helpful IMO. All we have in common is the
fact that we live on the same land mass.

------
hentrep
Monocle did a great story last week on the female-oriented Jigeentech Hub in
Dakar, Senegal (see the 2:00 point at [http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-
entrepreneurs/136/](http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-entrepreneurs/136/)).
This may not be the next Silicon Valley, but it sure seems like a start in the
right direction and an inspirational model for other developing nations.

------
terramars
Nigeria is the only African country where I'm familiar with the tech industry,
they have some jobs available in Telecom and Petroleum for trained locals -
though getting one of these is far from guaranteed even with a degree. Both
industries require quite a few coders. There's also the computer crime
industry which I suspect is one of the largest employers of programmers.

Anecdotally, Egypt produces a lot of high quality computer scientists.

------
ismail
South African here, there are _plenty_ of African coders/hackers. If they are
not blogging does not mean they do not exist.

Though, i have personally felt that community is lacking in other countries.

I have been traveling in other parts of Africa. I usually check in on
Meetup.com before traveling to see for any interesting hacker events, out of 4
countries i have been too in the last 3 months only Kenya had events i could
find.

------
ihatehandles
Zimbabwean. Bootstrapping couple tech startups (some profitable) here in
Africa for way over a year now.

Most (good) devs I know are self-taught. Employment opportunities pushing code
are so scarce it's hopeless for most which is why most move out or go into sys
admin/networking. The jobs don't pay that good as well but you can strike out
well with consulting.

Thanks to the internet Git, SASS, Heroku, AngularJS, Golang, NodeJS, Docker
and all other hacker goodness is adopted just as much (by the few willing) so
it's not like we're making sites with bash. We also have a few tech podcasts
and the occasional meetup.

Just that our communities are much much smaller and far apart that it's like
we're not there at all (thanks economy). Good developers are also hard to find
because most see no point in developing skills you never get to use. Things
are picking up though

------
gettingreal
This is a cool project. But don't let the fact that you are building an app
distract from the main goal (building a community).

I would suggest you first go to as many universities as you can, get their
computer science students on-board, and then connect to their alumni network.

And start organising meetups, hackathons and other events. You need to start a
small fire and it will kindle.

A simple website is good enough and you can start today.
[http://www.hackcampus.io/](http://www.hackcampus.io/) is doing something
similar in the UK.

A directory might not be so useful at this point.

I would also love to see the Tech space in Africa mature. I expect great
things to come out of that continent, and building a community Is definitely a
great place to start.

Put the code up on Github and I'll contribute.

------
eshvk
I suppose I too am an African programmer. I never thought of myself as one
because I first touched a computer after I left the continent. However, here I
am writing Machine Learning code.

------
liotier
I'm amazed that posting this article here resulted in good discussion while
posting it to Reddit's /r/programming
([http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/276oxb/where_ar...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/276oxb/where_are_the_african_programmers/))
only results in downvotes... That probably says something about differences in
outlook between those two forums.

------
mmsimanga
The one point I do not see mentioned in the comments is that most Africans do
not need software but probably something such as food, shelter, farming tools,
books, medicine/clinics, roads, clean water.

I am a Comp Sci graduate but honestly cannot think of a software product that
will make a difference to my cousins still in the village. I see software as a
luxury.

------
yawboakye
The problem of "missing" developers in Africa cannot be solved with another
database (there's already DevelopersInAfrica [1], and I think there could be
more). What I have identified as the problem since I started running
DevCongress [1] with a couple of friends and the general community of
programmers in Ghana is, ironically, community and activity.

You see, Ghanaians generally a quiet people, and it pierces all our circles.
It's hard to shake that dumb silence off, it's hard. Just look at
participation in our Google group [3] and how it's dominated by just me.
That's not what we wanted, obviously. So we set out solve the problem of
programmers restricting themselves to absolute silence. That familiarity among
ourselves would lessen the barrier to participation was our riskiest
assumption. So we started yet another project, namely, #eXchange (you can see
episodes here [4]). So far we are engaging really well via the videos, and
more importantly we're exposing the humans (and their humanness) behind the
big names in the programmer community in Ghana. It's been successful so far.

Last but not least of our attempts is FORGE [5]. Oh I so love FORGE! We have
plans to launch before the end of June but funds (we foot all the bills
ourselves) are holding us back a little. We are preparing to approach GitHub
Community [6] to ask for help. Since you're in Ghana we should link up to
discover even more ways that we can pull ourselves up to an appreciable, non-
mediocre level.

To all non-African programmers, please consider actively mentoring us even
though we can't afford to pay you. Also think about offering us internship and
job opportunities without paying significant attention to our CVs because tbh,
they're mostly crap.

[1] [http://www.developersinafrica.com](http://www.developersinafrica.com) [2]
[http://devcongress.com](http://devcongress.com) [3]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/devcongress](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/devcongress)
[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdep9xo0Y8UTvKehbhey2g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdep9xo0Y8UTvKehbhey2g)
[5] [http://forge.devcongress.com/faq](http://forge.devcongress.com/faq) [6]
[https://community.github.com/](https://community.github.com/)

------
pontjho
I suspect I'm one of the dark matter programmers Scott spoke of. I'm from
South Africa by the way

------
ekwogefee
Some African programmers like me build products from Africa... but brand our
products to look American/European. I guess some Asians do that also. This
move increased our sales considerably.

------
infruset
>A place where anyone can search programmers based on say, community,
programming language, project interests, _gender_ , age brackets etc

gender? really?

~~~
gambiting
If you can search by age,then why not gender? Both should have zero influence
on your abilities, and yet it's ok to discriminate against one but not the
other.

~~~
infruset
I can see your point, although your age can reflect your experience, whereas
your gender provides no information about your ability. I guess you could
argue that for a company willing to be more diverse (like Google recently), it
actually IS important to know people's gender for a kind of affirmative
action.

------
Major_Grooves
A lot of them in Ghana go to this school:
[http://meltwater.org/](http://meltwater.org/)

------
salimane
I've been asking this question for a long time...any african programmer in
Berlin or Germany ? check my contact :)

------
le_meta
They're all playing football.

