Brains, Bytes and Bottlenecks: Fixing Africa’s AI Talent Gap

Africa is experiencing an AI revolution. In 2022, the continent boasted the world’s fastest-growing developer community, with GitHub reporting a 40% year-on-year increase in open-source repository creation. The trend has abated slightly, but more recent evidence shows growth between 25% and 33% in 2024, at least in the ‘big four’ of Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt. Even amid a global economic slowdown, the number of professional developers on the continent grew by 3.8% to 716,000 between 2020 and 2021. This burgeoning talent pool presents a tremendous opportunity to harness the power of AI for economic and social progress...