The Latest GitHub Report Says Africa Is Breeding More Developers Than Anywhere In The World

There is hardly any doubt that the African tech ecosystem is witnessing effervescent growth, evident in the influx of funding and the proliferation of tech hubs across the continent.

And here comes yet more evidence that the ecosystem is currently in the middle of a growth spurt.

GitHub, the platform which brings together the world’s largest community of developers to develop, share, and build better software, just released its latest annual State of the Octoverse report.

According to the latest GitHub report, developers from Africa created 40 percent more open source repositories on the software engineering marketplace over the past year. It’s the highest growth percentage recorded globally.

GitHub defines “established” developer communities as those ones which have more than 10,000 contributors on the platform. Among African countries with established developer communities, the country that recorded the most growth was Morocco.

Interestingly, countries outside that are not typically mentioned in conversations pertaining to large developer communties, also recorded significant growth.

Among countries with less than 10,000 GitHub contributors, Guinea Bissau gave a particularly impressive statistic, recording over 500 percent growth. It’s an indication that tech hubs are sprouting even beyond countries traditionally known to be tech markets.

Here are some other highlights of the report:

• Almost three million organization accounts are now on GitHub.

• There are over 40 million developers building on GitHub, most of whom (80%) come from outside of the United States.

• Ten million new developers joined in the last year alone, 44 percent more created their first repository in 2019 than 2018, and 1.3 million made their very first contribution to open source. There were even contributions from Antarctica.

• More than 44 million repositories were created in the last year.

• On average, each public and private repository on GitHub depends on more than 200 packages.
• Python passed Java as the second-most popular language on GitHub by repository contributors. But Dart and Rust topped the list of fastest-growing languages by repository contributors.

Featured Image Courtesy: Euractiv