Software developers in middle income and developing countries typically earn less than those in rich, developed countries. In fact, we found that South African tech professionals can earn less than half their UK peers even after adjusting for tax and cost of living differences.
This has resulted in many African tech professionals emigrating to global tech centres to take advantage of higher paying jobs. Before COVID-19, one in five South African developers was planning to emigrate, four in five were open to moving. How will this trend be affected by the pandemic?
COVID-19 has rapidly accelerated the development of a global, remote labour market for tech skills. We believe this will erode the wage differential as Africans take advantage of higher paying international opportunities, either through emigration or simply remote working.
This is good news for some: existing African tech professionals will earn more without having to move, and international companies will save when employing African tech talent. However, it is bad news for the African tech ecosystem as African companies will have to pay more to attract and retain local tech talent, and the local government, which may lose out on income tax from emigration and remote working income, if it goes uncounted.
As the tech labour market becomes increasingly global, it should attract more Africans with its higher earnings in hard currency and create high returns for public and private investments in tech education. However, there is a top of funnel tech skills problem: traditional education shows weak capacity to train enough work-ready tech professionals to capture this demand.
There is an alternative solution to train more tech professionals - self-driven learning. Already 1 in 4 software developers in South Africa are self-taught and match the earnings of their formally trained peers.
People are teaching themselves to code online. Unfortunately, high quality online learning is not yet accessible to most Africans, who struggle with affordability, connectivity, and poor primary and secondary education.
Umuzi has launched the African Coding Network to bring together coding schools and industry partners across the continent, to offer affordable, high quality, supported self-driven learning through an Open Source edtech platform. By collaboratively building and providing access to this infrastructure, the ACN hopes to scale quality, affordable self-driven learning to train thousands of additional work-ready tech professionals.
This post is part of the ACN’s live research initiative to document the opportunities and challenges across the African tech skills landscape, as well as guide the roll out of the ACN’s edtech platform. This post features many references to the South African market. We are looking for research partners to help us extend the scope of our coverage to other African regions.