Nigeria has been ranked third in the list of African countries with highest number of software developers.
According to sources, Software developers are increasing in Africa just as international employers are also trooping to Africa to employ talents.
However, although Nigeria has more population and is regarded as the giant of Africa, South Africa and Egypt are leading in the number of software developers in Africa.
The two countries, South Africa and Egypt, lead other African countries in the size of the tech talent pool in African countries.
The report said that, “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, we have further focused our analysis on these countries in terms of the absolute number of developers per African country.
Thus, we can confirm that there are an estimated 690,000 professional softwareestimated 690,000 professional software programmers in Africa. More than half of these are from South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria.
READ MORE: Africa’s Storage, Distribution Challenges, Threaten Energy Security
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,
The above is the relative number of developers per million population:
Obviously, the absolute number of software developers in a country doesn’t paint the whole picture.
The report further said in the article that it would 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 tech and software developer pool but still a relatively modest one in comparison to the entire population size.
