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Last week, we wrote about why, despite all its talent, leadership excellence in Africa is rare.

This week, we’re still exploring the talent topic, but with a different thesis.

What if we flooded Africa with so much skilled talent that excellence (in any field) is no longer rare?

Walk with me.

They’ll also make up roughly half of the world’s workforce. 

Given those numbers, the notion that Africa’s youth is the world’s future is no longer unpopular.

The idea goes something like this:

In the 2010s, a lot of bets were made on this idea, from creative exports to business process outsourcing startups. 

But the biggest bet was this…

Since 2015, learning to code has been the most durable way for the average African to get a job and find security.

That year, Andela, a Nigerian startup, came with a strange pitch to Nigerian youths.

It paid them to learn to code, then, when they were good at it, it outsourced them to global tech companies.

The idea was that these engineers would earn much more than they could ever earn locally, while the company hiring them pays less than they’d typically pay locally.

It was the perfect trade, and it worked. 

By 2021, there were about 716,000 professional developers across the continent, and four in ten of them were already working for at least one company based outside Africa. 

The rise of engineers spun up another industry with it: the coding school industry. 

These companies cashed in on the fact that young people wanted to learn to code, and traditional schools weren’t teaching it to them. 

The loop was to train students, get them employed, and have more people want to get trained.

A lot of economic value was created out of this loop. Andela hit a $1.5 billion valuation in 2021, Moringa raised $9.5 million to date, and African Leadership Group, the parent company of ALX, has raised $1.5 billion in funding to date

But there’s bad news. This model might not hold for much longer, largely for two reasons. The first is…

In 2022, the world first received ChatGPT, a chat-based AI tool that could generate a lot of text based on questions you asked.

While it was great from the very first, it wasn’t perfect. 

It made mistakes, got facts wrong, and sometimes sounded all too inhuman.

AI has grown a lot since 2022.

In 2022, AI couldn’t reliably solve a high-school math problem.

Last month, it solved several problems in math that were previously unsolved at the helm of math.

But it’s also solving problems in other fields like biology and pharma.

It would’ve taken humans decades to map all kinds of proteins, an essential building block for drugs, and how they fold. 

Thanks to AI, it now takes minutes.

This step change in how quickly knowledge work can be done has hit the most unexpected of places: coding.

AI models can now write code faster, and sometimes better, than many humans.

They can plan, write, test, and debug code, and sometimes make decisions on their own.

Roughly 84% of developers now use AI coding tools, and 41% of all code is reportedly being written by AI.

And these developers see 40 - 70% faster code completion on average.

Then there’s cost, which is where it gets murky.

On the low-end, tools like Cline and Deepseek v4 can generate high-quality code for almost $0.

But when agentic coding (the kind that codes without instructions) is taken into account, the cost often shoots up.

Claude Code costs between $20 to $100 a month, and it can go even higher if you run out of usage.

Devin used to be $500 per month, but now it goes for $20. And Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent, will set you back between $20 to $200 a month.

These agents have disrupted the tech job market.

In the US, tech hiring for entry-level developers has dropped 20% since its 2022 peak.

Companies like Klarna, Block, and Microsoft have all laid off thousands of engineers, citing AI productivity gains.

While one can argue that these layoffs have happened for ulterior motives, one thing’s clear: the hiring boom that Africa banked on is shrinking.

But like we said, this is only one of the reasons. 

The second problem is harder to see, but it's the bigger one.

For a long time, the technology industry ran on software. 

The best businesses were ones that could be built cheaply, scaled digitally, and sold everywhere at once. 

A startup in Brazil could serve a customer in London without a physical footprint there. 

This is what made coding bootcamps a good arbitrage. 

You could teach someone a skill in three months that a company in San Francisco would happily pay for.

Today, the frontier has moved.

As AI takes over knowledge work and software becomes commonplace, companies have been forced to compete on harder, more physical problems. 

Globally, venture capital is pouring into chip design, aerospace, robotics, biotech, and energy infrastructure. 

In the first seven months of 2024 alone, robotics companies raised $9.7 billion. 

Hardware investments have more than doubled since 2020, from $115 billion to $280 billion. 

The insight driving all of this money is simple: the ability to build things that exist in the physical world is scarce, therefore valuable.

You can see this playing out in Africa, too. The continent's most interesting tech companies are solving physical problems that apps alone cannot fix.

Zipline built a drone network to deliver blood and vaccines to rural Rwandan hospitals that roads cannot reliably reach. 

It has now completed over 850,000 flights. 

Ampersand manufactures electric motorcycles in Nairobi, welds its own battery packs in-house, and has iterated its drivetrain designs faster than it ever could have if the factory were in another country. 

In April, Terra Industries opened the largest drone factory in Africa, capable of producing 30,000 units a year, at prices 55% lower than imported alternatives. 

At some point, solutions have to exist in the real world, and someone has to know how to build them there. 

The kind of coding work that was once the entry point into global tech like writing web applications, fixing bugs, and doing front-end work, is now largely done or at least assisted by AI. 

And the work that companies actually need humans for is becoming more technical, not less: designing chips, engineering biomedical devices, building autonomous systems.

These require an understanding of physics as much as programming.

It’s hard to train for that in three months, or even two years. 

They’re deep skills built slowly and compounded over time.

Fortunately, a new kind of institution is beginning to appear on the continent to fill that gap.

Carnegie Mellon University is one of the biggest research universities in the US. 

It’s been responsible for some of the most transformative technologies in the world:

In 2011, CMU launched its only campus outside the US. Guess where? Kigali, Rwanda.

The creation of the campus was a result of a partnership between the Rwandan government and CMU.

It started out as a graduate program with 24 research students. 

By 2019, it moved into a 6,000 square-meter space in Kigali Innovation City. 

By 2022, the Mastercard Foundation committed $275 million to it. $175 million in endowment, and $100 million to establish a center for Inclusive Digital Transformation in Africa.

This makes sure that CMU-Africa is financially secure in a way most African schools aren’t.

And this has borne fruit.

Today, CMU-Africa has produced over 1,000 alumni.

Over 90% of students find employment upon graduation, with many of them staying back in Africa.

And they’re not just finding jobs, but also solving problems.

One alumnus, Yuyun Francies Berinyuy, lost his sister to breast cancer and co-founded Check Me Ltd, an AI application for early breast cancer detection. 

A current student, Peace Bakare, interned at a machine learning lab in Switzerland using AI to determine survival rates in patients who had undergone surgery for liver cancer. 

Five CMU-Africa students and two adjunct instructors presented research at the 2025 NeurIPS Conference in California.

It’s one of the largest AI and machine learning conferences in the world, with more than 20,000 participants. 

This might seem small, but it's a durable impact.

Because we know that this model has worked before.

The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan was a government-backed research institution created in 1973. 

In 1976, it negotiated a technology transfer agreement with the American company RCA, bringing semiconductor secrets to Taiwan. Eleven years later, TSMC was spun out of ITRI by Morris Chang, the chairperson of ITRI at the time.

Today, TSMC controls 62% of the world’s semiconductor market.

There’s also the IITs of India.

When they were created, the goal was to create world-class engineering schools as good as MIT.

So, they partnered with many foreign superpowers to set up the schools in India.

IIT Kanpur came from a partnership with MIT, Caltech, Princeton, and six other US universities.

IIT Madras came out of a partnership with West Germany. 

They brought a culture of hands-on, vocational experience combined with frontier knowledge.

Today, IIT alums lead some of the world’s biggest companies like Google, IBM, and Adobe. They also contributed massively to India’s economic growth.

Their engineers built much of the infrastructure, from railways to dams, and even the Indian Space Research Organization.

They also founded and scaled many tech companies like TCS, Infosys, Zomato, Flipkart, and many more.

These schools are unique in one way: they have a direct connection to the state-of-the-art.

Instead of spending years trying to build a curriculum, they simply imported the best knowledge from where it already was, then worked harder to push the frontier forward.

And the country’s talent base became excellent in one generation.

Africa’s demographic dividend, while true, might not come from what we’ve always expected, which is to learn fast, digital skills, and sell them to the world for cheap.

It might come from learning the hard skills and solving global problems from Africa instead.

And for that to happen, there are no shortcuts. It starts with better schools.

What do you think about the rise of new schools in Africa?  

Tell me here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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