With over 500 million mobile subscribers, Africa has seen rapid growth in the ICT sector. The Internet economy in Africa is transforming the continent’s development by promoting economic opportunities, creating jobs, and providing innovative solutions.

According to a recent IFC report on the African internet economy, the continent’s Internet economy has the potential to reach $180 billion by 2025, accounting for 5.2% of the continent’s GDP (GDP).

The African continent has attracted a large number of international investors looking for new business opportunities. On the continent, Google has an AI lab. Microsoft is investing more than $100 million in Kenya and Nigeria to establish its first Africa Development Centre. Amazon plans to launch an AWS region in South Africa in 2020. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, intends to provide up to 1000 African blockchain developers with the necessary tools and training to launch their first DApps in the first quarter of 2021. Google is planning to train 29,000 students and 1,800 teachers in Kenya on remote learning using its Google Classroom platform.

The IFC also estimates that Africa has 690,000 professional software programmers. According to GitHub’s latest annual State of the Octoverse report, African developers created 40% more open-source repositories on the software engineering marketplace in the previous year—a higher growth percentage than any other continent globally. According to GitHub, Kenya ranks second in Africa in terms of fastest growing developer communities, with 54%, followed by Morocco with 65%.

Esther Njeri Mwangi, Public Relations Officer at inABLE