It is evident from our writing that tech startups and innovation are central to the growth of Africa and African economies. At the heart of tech and innovation in tech are the actual guys who create the cool apps and the neat websites and the frameworks around which these are built, the programmers! So the question occurred to us – how is Africa doing in terms of the programmer skill pool? This led us to experiment with a survey on the programmer landscape in Africa.
A big thank you to all those who took their time to fill in the survey. This one goes out to all of you!
Today we bring you the results of that survey:
We got a total of 181 responses to date (we’ll keep the survey open for more responses) from across Africa and the diaspora. The distribution from different regions of Africa was as follows:
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The countries represented included: Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Cameroun, Tanzania, Nigeria, Malawi, Senegal, Uganda, Mali, DR Congo and Sudan.
There was a massive difference in the number of responses that came from male respondents (172) versus female respondents (9):
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In terms of number of years programming, most are between the 1 to 10 years range:
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In terms of mode of learning, most learnt how to program from university or college but there’s also a good number who are self taught:
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Most are applications programmers. Looking at platforms and programming languages – most program applications for the web; the most popular programming languages are Java, followed by PHP and the least popular languages are F#, Smalltalk, Lisp and Objective C; finally, in terms of platform, most developers are using the Windows OS, Linux comes in second and the Mac has least users with 9% of the respondents programming on Mac:
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For those involved in mobile applications programming, the most popular platform is Android, followed by Java ME and the least popular is th Qt platform:
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Fewer respondents are involved in Open Source projects (65 out of the total 181). Some of the Open Source projects African programmers have been involved in include: Ushahidi, OpenRAVE, Javarosa, OpenXdata, OpenDataKit, Quantum GIS, Eclipse, Firefox, RapidSMS, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, OpenMRS amongst others.
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Need more Rubyist and more opensource !
agreed!
nice one, we are currently working on an open ruby on rails location based app to help war affected countries to easilly location missing family members and friends. love the survery, nice work and keep it up
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I thought the most interesting stat was the amount of programmers that are self-taugh!
Mark at http://www.idgconnect.com/blog