A 2021 Africa Developer Ecosystem report shows that the African continent has 716,000 developers, a number that speaks volume about the obvious skills gap in this part of the world.
This huge shortage of software engineers is crippling its growth and its global competitiveness. By all indications, it is obvious that technology has the ability to change individuals and an entire economy through the application of its skills.
An adequate provision of cutting-edge technology and education can empower a significant number of people, especially youth and women on the African continent to get successful in the tech industry.
Projects or initiatives like this will not only create new employment opportunities but also accelerate innovative changes in Africa.
Deimos a cloud technology and professional services company with expertise and focus on cloud-native development and security operations wants to make this happen in Africa as it is determined to support the continent in producing 10 million software engineers.
On a mission to close the gap in technology while fostering digital transformation, Deimos is also utilizing the power of cloud technology to provide a comprehensive training program to support Africans in software development.
To create a more level playing field, Deimos is also committed to reducing the gender gap in tech with its sponsorship of She Code Africa because gender parity and equality in the tech industry have not been achieved, despite the increasing rise of data scientists throughout many African regions.
In a chat with Yekeen Ajeigbe, Senior Engineering Manager at Deimos, he discussed the importance of educating homegrown talent to help increase the share of the global engineer market, and how Deimos is working with She Code Africa to ensure more women can pursue a career in tech.
There are platforms that have identified these skill gaps with the intention of developing a significant number of engineers on the continent. What is Deimos doing differently?
As a leading cloud technology and security operations company, we have found that sustainability and viability come with being heavily invested in the development of engineers.
Deimos has a formidable professional team of software and cloud-native architects, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE’s), and Software Security Experts, from all across Africa, that build innovative, complex, and scalable cloud-native software solutions with developer and security operations best practices.
However, there is an undeniable skills gap in which we are passionately dedicated to plugging alongside your quintessential developer boot camp or academy.
What is most unique about Deimos’ commitment to upskilling tech talent is our holistic approach. While there are many different platforms on the continent focusing on tackling different aspects of the problem, for instance, the training aspect or the talent sourcing and placement aspect, we more or less have a structure that covers the entire spectrum, through our in-house initiatives and partnerships.
We also have wider pan-Africa coverage, as opposed to limiting our coverage to a particular geography. So here’s what we do:
We focus on hiring, nurturing, and growing tech talent across Africa. We have hired exceptionally talented developers from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Senegal, growing them from beginners and enthusiasts to world-class professionals.
In partnership with She Code Africa, we have provided paid internship opportunities for young female Site Reliability Engineers based in Nigeria. To date, we have had 8 Site Reliability Engineering interns who joined us from She Code Africa.
In addition, we have a successful Software Engineering Internship program where young software engineers follow a structured 6-month program and get the opportunity to work and learn from experienced team members with a significant percentage then being retained as junior engineers at Deimos.
In 2023, we want to focus on improving our internship programs and start incorporating interns from other African countries, such as Kenya or Ghana.
Creating an environment where Africans abroad can come back home including remote working, salary parity, and the opportunity to work with African clients and contribute towards supporting successful businesses in Africa.
If the gender gap is a global trend, how will Deimos deploy its strategy to equal the balance on the African continent?
Deimos finds that Africa’s problems are unique in the sense that it generally borders on a lack of opportunities and subsequent skills, limited access to the internet, not enough mentors and representation, and more.
These have combined to compound barriers, which impacts the growing gender divide on the continent.
Our strategy is to provide more free access to learning digital skills for women and through continuous dedication, become central to the digital empowerment of women and girls on the continent.
This is why we have invested time and resources to She Code Africa, a female tech community of over 10,000 members across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, South Africa, Cameroon, Côte D’Ivoire, Rwanda, Liberia plus more and whose goal to have an Africa where women are equally represented across all career roles in Technology, aligns perfectly with our ethos.
The focus is to continue to encourage young women to pursue and dominate a career within this ever-growing technology industry.
We hope that as we continue to create examples and outliers of successful women in tech, it creates a ripple effect and point of reference for many young girls on the continent to venture into the industry.
What has Deimos identified to be the challenge for few women in tech, lack of opportunity or interest?
There are perhaps several reasons why gender parity and equality in the tech industry have not been achieved in many African regions, such as:
- A lack of female role models in the tech industry, which makes it less appealing to young women.
- Limited access to education and resources for women, particularly in rural areas.
- Fewer women are encouraged to study engineering, which leads to fewer women entering the tech industry.
- The lack of flexible working hours and parental leave policies that can make it difficult for women to balance work and family responsibilities.
Although this does vary from country to country within Africa, we feel positive that there should be an upturn in these numbers.
For one, remote working bridges the gap for working mothers by creating more flexibility and time in their work day. Secondly, companies like Deimos are actively creating more awareness that it is a career opportunity for females and enabling them to pursue their career ambitions through our various initiatives and lastly great nonprofits such as She Code Africa and She Hacks Africa are focused on celebrating and empowering young Girls and Women in Technology across Africa.
Deimos partnership with She Code Africa, the journey so far, challenges and milestones
Deimo’s partnership with She Code Africa is a marriage of two organizations with similar ideologies. So far, Deimos has been a financial contributor to the organization at large for almost 3 years, also sponsoring bi-annual cohorts to enable the boot camps to be run efficiently.
Deimos has also provided mentors for the boot camp, to provide knowledge, challenges, and open forums for the candidates to learn and grow.
The challenges have generally been centered on the broader socio-economic issues on the continent as previously highlighted.
However, through this partnership, Deimos has been able to give numerous female techies the opportunity to learn in a real-life environment, exposing them to a diverse range of work experiences, clients and projects, as well as an opportunity to meet engineers from different parts of the world and collaborate with them on a professional level. Deimos has proven itself to be a dedicated transformative company within the African tech realm.
How will educating homegrown talent benefit Africa?
A report by IFC, showed that only 50 percent of countries in Africa have ‘computer’ skills as part of their school curriculum, compared to 85 percent of countries globally.
This needs to be improved on. We believe that there is no greater group than African developers and entrepreneurs to utilize their skills and ingenuity to solve local issues and empower their communities.
So in this 21st century, homegrown technology talent is going to be instrumental in solving some of the most pressing challenges of our time, creating new markets and jobs, and essentially catalyzing Africa’s economic potential.
It can also be argued that for the first time in history or at least in much more capacity than ever before, the African continent has the chance to grow in parallel with the rest of the world through technological innovation.
So by upskilling tech talent to be at par with the rest of the world, we can anticipate that Africa will be at the forefront of delivering solutions that can help generate a lot of wealth for the continent.
Emerging technology like the Metaverse has already been estimated to have the capacity to add $40 billion to Africa’s GDP in ten years.
By 2050, a quarter of the world will be African, and so by strengthening Africa’s young and expanding workforce population with the tech skills required to flourish and compete with the rest of the world, Africa can be on course to be the huge force to reckon with in the world economy.
The impact of tech is already quite evident. In Nigeria, the technology sector contributed more to the country’s GDP than the oil and gas sector between 2010 and 2019 and Kenya’s information and communications technology (ICT) sector contributed up to 8 percent of the country’s GDP through IT-enabled services, also generating ~250,000 jobs in 2021.
So educating our homegrown talent is key to helping Africa realize its true potential and Deimos is fully committed to contributing our quota to enabling this growth.
Featured Image: Yekeen Ajeigbe, Senior Engineering Manager at Deimos
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