Today, Africa is the continent where all the biggest tech companies of the world are counting on. Thanks to those new establishments, lots of new jobs are to come for the local people.
Since 2003, Silicon Valley’s geeks are coming in Africa back and forth. this promising market is attracting the giants of the digital world, who are investing in the continent one after the other. South Africa has already emerged as a major hub tech in the continent but however other countries are also stepping into the highly prized game.
High numbers of investors
There used to be a lot of centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI) all over the world except on the African continent. Well not anymore. Since April 13th, Google opened an AI center in Accra (Ghana). It will welcome the best “Machine Learning” engineers and researchers in order to work together in AI related projects researches and apps. Ghana’s Google AI Research Center is under the leadership of a senegalese named Moustapha Cissé. Simultaneously Google is also investing huge amounts of money, in innovating spaces like the Nairobi hub, and also in training programs. In fact the American giant would like to set up partnerships with local universities and institutions and with policy makers to be able to take actions in different fields ( agriculture, health, education) and that way allow AI development in the continent.
Microsoft is among the giants interested in African computer science talents and is about to launch 2 softwares development centers in Lagos (Nigeria) and Nairobi ( Kenya)) after having already opened 2 this year in South Africa. This 100 million dollars project will first have 100 full time developers then 500 more by 2023. Microsoft is confident about the potential of Africa just like Google which is also setting up trainings by joining forces with Facebook in order to offer AI training. Chinese companies Huawei and Amazon Web also plan on opening data centers in the continent.
key jobs
This sudden interest represent a major asset for local talents and engineers. Nigeria, which is the fourth country with the fastest growing developers community is standing out of the crowd. The country is already considered to be one of the main tech hub and is catching the attention. According to Google, their trainings in digital will allow for 10 millions of Africans to acquire new competences, therefore creating candidates that would be capable to meet with the expectation of an sector on a rise. More than 2 million of African students have already graduated and more than 100.000 developers and 60 startups have benefited from the Google Launchpad Accelerator Africa program. In the years to come, the new structures will be doing a lot of hiring. The opportunities in that section turn out to be very interesting, both financially speaking and on a personal development level. What is certainly missing is qualified developers to meet with the demands of an expanding sector, because right now there are not enough profiles to do to.
C.CLuzel