What does it mean for technology to be innately African?

This is the question that a group of passionate Africans at Microsoft set out to answer by pioneering the NextTech Africa conference.

I attended the event set in Nairobi, Kenya along with other technology leaders, to engage with the possible answers to that question. Let me tell you more about my experience.

I was invited to join a panel to discuss engineering at scale — specifically, the challenges and opportunities we face at Andela while building and scaling a world-class African engineering organization.

Discussing engineering at scale with John Muthiora (M-KOPA), Hoop Somuah (Microsoft), and Dona Sarkar (Microsoft).

While brilliance can be found on the African continent as much as anywhere else, the amount of people that have been exposed to world-class software engineering practices however, is limited. Therefore, I raised the challenge of hiring technical talent; a pain point for African organizations trying to build for the future when there are business needs constantly evolving.

This technical hiring problem sparked up an interesting casual conversation later on between myself and other conference attendees as regards to why Microsoft (and most of the tech giants) have yet to open engineering offices in Africa. As this conversation unfolded, one key point made by a participant stood out to me the most:

“Tech giants have yet to really pay attention to Africa as a hub of engineering talent, and what will grab their attention is People or Product.”

The reality is that Africa does have both people and products — but they haven’t been exposed on the global scale as much.

People

One might ask, which people was he referring to here exactly? Africa is the second-most-populous continent, people is the last thing we lack. Well, here he was referring to examples of African technologists occupying leadership positions at multi-million/billion dollar organizations. His analogy: if someone were to ask if there was technical talent in Asia, the answer would be without a doubt. Why? A significant number of Silicon Valley CEOs are from Asia. And some of the greatest, at that: Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jack Ma, etc.

To this, I say they haven’t looked hard enough. While they may not be running billion dollar organizations, there are a number of African technology leaders who are making considerable impact on the continent: Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Mark Essien, Celestine Omin, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Nadayar Enegesi, Jason Njoku, Sim Shagaya, are such examples just to name a few. The developer ecosystems in Africa (e.g. Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala) are very vibrant and booming.

Product

The argument here is, tech giants will take notice of Africa as a hub of technical talent if we can point them to a list of revolutionary products that have come out of the continent.

Again, have you looked around? Flutterwave is fixing the fragmented payment ecosystem in Africa, Paystack is helping businesses in Africa accept online payments worldwide, BRCK is providing internet connectivity to areas of the world with poor infrastructure, Andela is creating an army of technical talent, M-KOPA is connecting 500 new homes to solar power every day, iROKOtv provides a on-demand video platform for Nollywood movies (the third largest film industry in the world), and the list goes on.

While not abundant (yet!), Africa hosts numerous technology leaders making tremendous impact on the continent by fostering the developer community (The People) and/or building solutions tailored to African problems (The Product). The NexTech Africa conference is a testament that tech giants such as Microsoft and others have been taking notice of the upcoming technology revolution on the continent.