Africa is no longer merely a market for technologies conceived elsewhere. It is progressively establishing itself as a reservoir of digital skills in rapid expansion, to the point of displaying today the fastest growth in the world in the training and emergence of software developers.
One of the major findings of the report Develop the Developers: A Strategic Priority for Africa, published in early April 2025 by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Drawing on GitHub data, the study highlights a silent yet strategic transformation: between 2019 and 2024, the number of developers on the continent grew by 21% per year, the fastest pace anywhere in the world.
In 2024, Africa counted 4.7 million developers. The figure remains modest compared with 73.9 million in Asia, 27.5 million in Europe, or 24 million in North America.
Even South America maintains a larger base. But behind this quantitative lag, the continent shows a dynamic far more powerful than its competitors. Africa now holds a distinctive position in the global digital economy: it remains at the lower end of the volume scale, yet it is rising faster than anyone else.
Tunisia among the African trio that counts.
This rise in power, however, is neither uniform nor automatic. It does not follow demography, nor the size of domestic markets. The BCG report shows instead that the strongest performances rest primarily on the quality of public policies, the structuring of technological ecosystems, and the effectiveness of education systems.
