Nigeria Comes 3rd As South Africa, Egypt Lead African Countries With More Developers

Nigeria comes 3rd in the list of African countries with highest number of software developers.

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 lead other African countries in the size of the tech talent pool in African countries.

A report by Tunga.io said of this thus:

“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.

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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 software developers in a country doesn’t paint the whole picture.

In a report by tunga.io, it 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 developer pool but still a relatively modest one in comparison to the entire population size.