Gimmie the devs 🧑🏽‍💻

Nigerians reign, Morocco's untapped potential and R-squared de ouf

Let’s start with some common wisdom, and see where we can get.

1. We need tech talent to build tech products.

2. We need tech products to build tech companies.

3. We need tech companies to have smiley VCs in Patagonia vests knocking at our door.

Is there some sort of relationship between the abundance of tech talent and the amount of venture capital money that will pour into an ecosystem?

Of course, having loads of skilled software engineers is not enough; especially if your national market is too small, your policies are not business-friendly, or your devs only dream of being employed remotely by big corporations overseas.

But I grew curious as Github Octoverse’s report suggests that the surge of African developers on the platform is “likely attributable to a surge in venture capital investment in African startups”.

Wait a minute. Chicken-egg problem here:

Does VC money go where there are a lot of software engineers?

Or do software engineers grow from under the trees once they smell VC money?

In any case, I wanted to have fun with some data and try to answer the following questions:

• What are the African countries with the most developers (per Github data)?

• Is there any type of correlation between the number of developers and VC investments?

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In this graph, we see the evolution of the number of active Github accounts over the past 3 years, for the 10 most active African countries.

What we can gauge is that:

• Proud Nigerians overcame Egypt and earned the highest spot on the podium;

• “The Big 4” are well represented in the first (5) positions;

• Kudos to all North African countries for their good placement, especially Morocco.

This last point is likely the most interesting to me. But let’s move forward.

Is there a correlation between the number of developers and VC investments?

I ran a regression between the number of VC deals (source: The Big Deal) and the number of active Github accounts.

It turns out that the two have a correlation score of 0.77 (🤯). This high score suggests that there is indeed a relationship between the variables (even though “correlation is not causation” and hidden variables like the size of the economy could have an impact on both).

Whatever the underlying cause, it is nonetheless reasonable to say that Morocco, Algeria, and Ethiopia are subject to under-investment from VC, if we look at their untapped tech talent.

Why this is so, I don’t know. Maybe, developers in these countries are working on something different than VC-investable tech products.

I am personally impressed by Morocco.

The country has almost 500k active Github accounts. And yet, in 2022 the ecosystem received a bit less than 19M dollars in VC investment, over 38 deals.

What’s happening Morocco? What are your devs doing all day?

I am open to suggestions friends! And remember the old saying:

“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, share Data Bites with a friend”

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Methodological disclaimers:

• As a proxy of VC investments, I selected the number of deals (instead of the dollar amount invested) to offset the impact of mega-rounds;

• The scatterplot dispersion makes the graph less interpretable due to the outsized impact of The Big 4 on both variables.

Here is a log-scaled version to better visualize the correlation.