Andela unveils its Uganda’s first-ever developer ecosystem report that was conducted from an inaugural developer survey launched on May 30th, 2019 closing in October 2019. Out of 1,053 respondents that visited the survey page, 800 completed the survey, yielding a completion rate of 75.97%.
The report shows some interesting findings including; 51.3% of Uganda’s developers are mostly junior developers. Last year, we saw Andela cut-off 250 junior engineers from its Nigeria and Uganda hubs. The move came as the company was restructuring its talent pool to more closely align with global market demand. That aside;
Andela is a private engineering as-a-service company that helps global companies overcome the severe shortage of skilled software developers. According to Uganda’s report, 39.1% of the respondents are full-time employees, 11.4% are part-time employees, 15.1% are freelancers with 5.7% working as interns.
Of the total number of employed respondents, 47.9% work for startups, 28.2% work for corporate organisations, 18% work for NGOs and 5.8% work for government entities. Most freelancers are working with startups and NGOs with a few developers working for corporate entities.
Notably, there isn’t a single freelancer working with government, possibly due to the regulations around eligibility for working on government contracts.
Of all Ugandan developers, over 80% of the software developers are working in and around Kampala, with a few scattered in the other major cities including; Wakiso, Mbarara, Mukono, Mbale, and Gulu. And as we mentioned before, these developers are mostly Juniors where 87.4% are in Kampala, 3.7% are in Wakiso, 3.7% are in Mbarara, 2.3% are in Mukono, 1.2% are in Mbale and 1.6% are in Gulu.
In the coming years, Andela expects to have a balance in the distribution of developers at all levels as the Juniors become Mid-level developers. It is also expected that there will be a gradual increase in the Junior developer numbers basing on the respondents data on when they wrote their first line of code. That number has seen a spike in recent years indicating a growing interest in the industry and this guarantees continuity.
On the other hand, the report shows that 83% of the developers population is male while 16% is female. Javascript is currently the most used language in the ecosystem followed by Pthyon, PHP, Java, Swift, among others.
Javascript is a core component of web technology so its popularity comes as no surprise. It is supported across all browsers and is executable on the client and server side. Having started out as a lightweight scripting language for browsers, it is now considered a general purpose language that is relatively easy for a first time learner to grasp.
Andela claims it has played a significant role in boosting the number of developers in these languages, particularly the Junior developer numbers.
Speaking to the importance of the report, Ms. Jackie Ochola, Country Director Andela Uganda said, “The report is a big step for the Ugandan ecosystem and we believe it will be a valuable resource to take targeted actions for growth.”
She added that Africa is the world’s fastest-growing continent form software developers and for them to continue to invest in the growth of the craft, they urgently need to understand the ecosystems.
Some corrections have been to this article from its time of publication
