Two credible-looking numbers describe the same thing, Africa's developers, and they differ by a factor of about six. Google and Accenture's survey-based report put the continent's professional developer pool at around 716,000 in 2021. Boston Consulting Group's 2026 analysis, built mainly on GitHub usage data, puts it at 4.7 million in 2024. Neither is wrong. They count different people over different years, and the gap is the starting point for any reading of African software capacity that goes beyond funding.
Key takeaways
- "Developer" has at least three definitions in use: professional workers (Google/Accenture), anyone with a GitHub account (GitHub, BCG) and survey respondents (Stack Overflow, JetBrains).
- GitHub-based counts are the only ones with country growth rates, and they rely on self-reported location and public activity only.
- The two big annual surveys cannot give a country-level read for most African markets from what they publish.
- Rank agreement across independent proxies is a reasonable signal. Adding their numbers together is not.
- None of these measures says whether a given company can deliver; they describe a market's depth.
Five proxies, five questions
| Proxy | What it counts | Period and place | Best use | Main flaw | |---|---|---|---|---| | Google/Accenture, Africa Developer Ecosystem 2021 | Professional developers, by survey and expert interviews | 2021; 16 markets, "extrapolated to the rest of Africa" | Professional workforce size and growth | Extrapolated; dated; commissioned by a platform vendor | | BCG, Develop the Developers | Developers, defined broadly to include students, researchers and self-taught | 2024, with growth 2019 to 2024; mainly GitHub usage data plus "proprietary data-scraping techniques" | Comparing continents and finding fast-growing small markets | Scraping method is not public; counts are of accounts | | GitHub Octoverse | Anyone with a GitHub account | Oct 2023 to Sept 2024 (2024 edition); Sept 2024 to Aug 2025 (2025 edition) | Country growth rates, by year | Location is self-reported; public activity only | | Stack Overflow Developer Survey | Respondents who saw Stack Overflow's prompts | 2025 edition: 29 May to 23 June 2025; 49,009 responses from 177 countries (a 2026 edition was published on 6 October 2026 and we have not compared it) | Tool and practice trends | Recruited from Stack Overflow's own audience; no weighting described | | JetBrains Developer Ecosystem | Respondents, weighted | April to June 2025; 24,534 developers from 194 countries and regions | Tool and practice trends | Africa is one grouped region of 19 |
A sixth method sits apart. Rossi and Zacchiroli's study of 2.2 billion commits from about 43 million authors in the Software Heritage archive assigned authors to regions using email domains, author names and UTC offsets in commit metadata. It avoids self-reported profiles, which makes it a useful cross-check on method. The abstract does not give an Africa-specific share, so it is not a source for a number.
Where the proxies disagree
The Google and Accenture figure and BCG's figure disagree because of definition, year and method. Google's blog says the pool grew 3.8% in 2021 and equalled 0.4% of the continent's non-agricultural workforce. BCG reports growth of 21% a year from 2019 to 2024, the fastest of five continents. A professional-worker series that grows 3.8% in a pandemic-affected year and an account-based series that grows five times faster are not contradicting each other, because a student who opens a GitHub account is a developer in one and not in the other.
That is why we would not divide one by the other to get a "conversion rate". The definitions differ and the years differ.
GitHub's own numbers show the scale of the GitHub-based picture. Octoverse 2024 listed more than 1.1 million developers in Nigeria (28% year on year), more than 990,000 in Egypt, more than 664,000 in South Africa, more than 556,000 in Morocco and more than 393,000 in Kenya (33%). GitHub defines a developer as "anyone with a GitHub account" and only publishes a country metric when at least 100 unique developers performed the activity. The 2025 edition maps developers to countries "via self-reported locations" and groups Africa with the Middle East, reporting 3.4 million net new developers for the combined region from 2024 to 2025, with Nigeria, Turkey and Egypt as stand-out markets. That regional figure cannot be used for Africa alone.
Reading them together without merging them
Here is a method that keeps each dataset in its own lane.
Step 1. Use each source for one question. Workforce size comes from a survey of professionals. Account growth comes from GitHub. Practice and tooling come from the surveys. Do not answer one question with another source's number.
Step 2. Compare inside a source. Compare Nigeria with Kenya in Octoverse 2024, or Nigeria 2023 with Nigeria 2024 in the same series. Never compare Octoverse's Nigeria with BCG's Africa total.
Step 3. Test agreement of ranks. Ask whether independent proxies put the same markets near the top. The Google report names South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya and Morocco as the five markets with the most professional developers, with South Africa at 17% of the continent's total and Nigeria and Egypt at about 12% each (Connecting Africa's summary of the report). Octoverse 2024 lists Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Morocco and Kenya as its five largest African counts. The sets match even though the order differs, the years differ and the methods differ. That agreement is a stronger signal than any single count.
Step 4. Read disagreement as a question. BCG says Ethiopia and Angola grew fastest from 2019 to 2024 from small bases. A fast-growing small base is a lead to investigate, not a ranking.
Step 5. Keep the denominators. BCG notes Nigeria has fewer developers per 1,000 inhabitants than Kenya or Réunion. Raw totals reward large populations.
Take the AI and data share as a small illustration. BCG reports the average African country has 13.9% of developers working in AI, ML and data science, and that Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Kenya sit between 15% and 20%. That is a statement about the mix inside BCG's dataset, so it tells you where to look first, and not how many practitioners there are.
What the proxies miss
Our reading: developer proxies catch participation and miss delivery. A country can have many accounts and few people who have shipped and maintained production systems for paying clients. The reverse also occurs, because private repositories, enterprise tooling and non-GitHub hosting are invisible to a public-activity count. Octoverse says its metrics "cover public activity only" unless noted.
The surveys have their own limit. Stack Overflow's top ten respondent countries, led by the United States at 20.4%, contain no African country, and its methodology says highly engaged Stack Overflow users were more likely to notice the prompts. JetBrains weights its responses to "estimated populations of professional developers" in each region, which means the quality of those population estimates feeds directly into the result, the same estimates the previous section shows are contested.
The strongest counterargument to using any of this: funding is at least a transaction that happened, whereas an account is free to open. That is fair. It is why developer data should be read as a second lens on depth, not as a replacement for company-level evidence.
Buyer guidance
Use country developer data to decide where to look first, and use company evidence to decide whom to hire.
- Pick the question. Market depth (account growth), professional workforce (survey) or vendor capability (company evidence). Each needs a different source.
- Cite the definition. If someone quotes "X developers in Nigeria", ask which dataset, which year and what counts as a developer.
- Ask vendors for headcount by role and tenure. Engineers, QA, DevOps and security counts, and how many have been there over two years. A market's account count says nothing about a team's staffing.
- Ask for shipped evidence. Production references, public repositories where relevant, release cadence, and who maintains the systems after launch.
- Be wary of single-city claims. These sources are country-level at best.
- Operators and ecosystem builders: if you publish developer counts, state the definition, the period, and how location was assigned.
For markets where you need to compare companies, country pages and find a partner help build a shortlist, and intelligence collects market notes. A directory profile can confirm who a company is and where it operates, while its delivery capacity has to be established directly.
Frequently asked questions
How many developers are there in Africa? It depends on the definition. A Google and Accenture report estimated around 716,000 professional developers in 2021, while BCG's 2026 analysis estimated 4.7 million developers in 2024 on a broader, GitHub-based definition. The two should not be compared directly.
Is GitHub data reliable for African countries? It is useful for growth and rank order within GitHub's own series. It relies on self-reported location and public activity, and it counts accounts, not employed engineers.
Do the Stack Overflow and JetBrains surveys cover Africa? Both include African respondents. Stack Overflow's methodology shows an audience-driven sample with no weighting described, and JetBrains reports Africa as one grouped region. Neither publishes a country-level view for most African markets in the pages we could read.
Which African countries have the most developers? South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya and Morocco appear in both the 2021 Google/Accenture report and GitHub's 2024 Octoverse among the largest, in different orders.
Sources
- Boston Consulting Group, Develop the Developers: A Strategic Priority for Africa, 24 March 2026.
- GitHub, Octoverse 2024.
- GitHub, Octoverse 2025: A new developer joins GitHub every second as AI leads TypeScript to #1.
- Stack Overflow, 2025 Developer Survey methodology.
- JetBrains, State of Developer Ecosystem 2025 methodology.
- Google, African developers: creating opportunities and building for the future, 21 February 2022.
- Connecting Africa, Africa's developer pool strong and growing, 22 February 2022.
- Rossi and Zacchiroli, Geographic Diversity in Public Code Contributions, arXiv, 2022.
General information for market analysis; not investment advice. Developer counts are estimates from the sources named.