Open-source Af rica
Spend much time around tech companies and initiatives in Africa and it’s hard not to be infected by the constant upbeat enthusiasm for the potential of tech on the continent. Whether the challenge is government accountability, the rule of law, business practices or education, the vision expressed by activists, corporate workers and politicians alike is that digital technologies will leapfrog centuries of under investment in infrastructure, just like mobile phones did for the communications network.
Some of this is typical Silicon Valley techno-evangelism, and cynics can rightly point out that many of the solutions being offered to help solve social issues across the continent are also handy ways for US-based megacorporations to find new customers and profit streams. It’s a stance summed up in the title of Noam Cohen’s new book, The-Know-It-Alls.
Nevertheless, without wanting to generalise too much, the impact of tech has been positive.
In 2015, the World Bank tried to count the number of tech hubs there were on the continent. This was a good exercise because places like CoCreation Lab have played a vital role in focusing communities on local problems in civic and business life, and bringing together people with the skills to solve them (such as the team behind BudgIT). It’s problematic because the definition of a “tech hub” is pretty nebulous, and doesn’t guarantee there’s any kind of useful activity or community there.
That said, the World Bank rightly points out that “technology clusters create a snowball effect”. In 2015, it identified 117 hubs, and just under two years later a similar survey by the GSMA counted 314, “a number that keeps on growing at a weekly basis”.
Many of these hubs, and the startups that they incubate, will fail. But their impact is measurable. In August 2013, there were only 4,537 GitHub accounts registered in African countries, almost all of them based in South Africa, Egypt and Kenya. The total number of GitHub accounts at the time was 3,850,000 – so Africans made up just 0.12 per cent of the total population of open source developers using the ubiquitous tool.
Today, there are 24 million GitHub accounts, a six-fold increase in the overall total. But 486,000 of those users are now based in Africa, over 100 times the 2013 total. And their number keeps growing.