Once upon a time, barely a handful of people in Africa knew about open source or even tech in general. At the time, tech was still relatively new to the ecosystem. Yes, we had software engineers in different African countries, but the prevailing fields were still Medicine and surgery, Law, and banking.
In fact, if you told an African parent you wanted to become a software engineer during this time, most of them would talk you out of it in a lovely manner, while others would literally threaten to disown you if you did not study to become one of the big three - a medical doctor, a lawyer or a banker. However, a lot has changed since then. The African population has moved from not knowing about tech to becoming a continent where most people now know about tech and want to have a career in tech.
In this article, I’ll be taking you on a journey that explains the growth and impact of open source in Africa. It will cover how we moved from a few Africans knowing about open source to the incredible increase in Africans contributing to and building open source projects, what triggered this increase, and what we believe is the next phase of open source in Africa.
How it all began
Remember I said I’ll be taking you on a journey? Let’s start with how it all began.
The educational system in Nigeria is designed to ensure that anybody in a university studying to get a science degree must go for industrial training in their third year to gain real-life experience before they graduate from the university. For context, an industrial training is like an internship, but in this case, you must spend these six months working at a company that aligns with the degree you want to graduate with. Since I studied computer science, I did my industrial training in a tech company called Start Innovation Hub and spent six months there learning how to develop Android applications.
One of the unique things about this company was that tech companies that wanted to establish their presence in Africa, like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, would reach out to the company's CEO (Hanson Johnson) to host community-focused events for them. My time at this company introduced me to developer communities and their importance in the ecosystem. Since I worked there, I’d automatically have access to these events. I would hear inspiring tech career journies from the speakers, learn more about tech, and begin to see that I had a chance at becoming a software engineer after graduating from university. During one of the talks at the event, a speaker who was giving a talk about Javascript highlighted how it was an open source language and talked a bit about what open source was. I found it fascinating but never looked into it after that because I wanted to focus solely on my industrial training goal - to learn how to develop Andriod applications.
Luckily for me, during a joint GDG event at the end of every year, one of the speakers, Samson Goddy, talked about open source in detail. He explained what it meant, how to contribute, its impact on your tech career, and so much more. His talk at the event convinced me to give open source contribution a shot. Samson and I would then connect on Facebook, and I would ask him to tell me more about open source and guide me through making my first contribution to a project. He recommended that I start with the Google Summer of Code program since I was still at university.
This led me to find the Open Data Kit, an open source organization that owned an Android application for collecting data worldwide. I selected a good first bug and started working on fixing that bug. I would eventually submit a pull request, which will be merged by the project's maintainers, leading to one of the best days of my life. To this day, I still remember when I found out the pull request was merged. I couldn't believe that the code I wrote would be utilized by thousands of people all over the world. It was one of the best days of my life.
Why am I telling you this? It's because, like myself, not many people in the tech ecosystem in Africa knew about open source or what it meant. We were at the peak of tech companies wanting to establish themselves in Africa, and the few people who were in tech were spreading the gospel about tech and encouraging people to join in. However, open source was barely mentioned in these conversations or quickly glanced over if mentioned. As time went by, something happened that moved Nigeria and eventually other African countries to become active in the open source ecosystem.
What, you may ask?
It was Open Source Community Africa (OSCA), created by Samson Goddy and Ada Nduka Oyom. OSCA was designed to increase awareness about open source in Africa and the number of African contributors and creators in the open source ecosystem. When OSCA started in 2018, an event was hosted in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, with about 20 to 50 people in attendance. In 2019, OSCA hosted open source-focused events in Lagos and Uyo, other states in Nigeria.
Each of these events would typically have about 20 to 80 people in attendance. This was a great first step, but we knew we needed to reach more people to achieve our goals. This inspired us to try something different and host an open source festival. A festival that would be sorely focused on open source, last for three days, and include workshops, talks, panel sessions, etc.
At the time we were planning to do this, something like that had never been done in any country in Africa. The only big tech events in Africa then were created by Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, these events were fantastic and impactful to the African tech ecosystem, but we wanted something focused only on open source. So we made the necessary arrangements and birthed the biggest open source conference in Africa - OSCAFEST.
The big shift - OSCAFEST
The Open Source Festival (OSCAFEST) triggered THE BIG SHIFT from people not knowing about or being interested in open source to more people being interested in open source in Africa.
The first OSCAFEST in 2020 had more than 800+ attendees, lasted for 3 days, and had over 29 talks and 12 workshops, all focused on open source. We had speakers like Eriol Fox from Ushahidi, Aniedi from Google, Prosper from Eden, Stephen Walli from Microsoft, Henry Zhu from Babel, and sponsors like GitHub, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation were present. Here are a few highlights:
The first day was sorely focused on workshops because we didn’t just want to tell people about open source; we wanted to show them how to contribute, so these workshops served as hands-on sessions.
The second and third days were focused on panel sessions and talks. One of the panel sessions focused on increasing the number of Africans that got into open source programs like Outreachy, Google Summer of Code, and Google Season of Docs. Since we had about 6 Africans who had successfully participated in these programs in attendance, they shared tips that will help the attendees get into the program, how being part of the open source program impacted their careers, and much more.
- Prosper Otemuyiwa’s “Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results” talk stood out. He shared how open source was a big part of what changed his life, how tiny changes, like making your first open source contribution, could lead to something huge over time. He used Henry Zhu as a case study - how he made his first contribution to Angular by continuously contributing to several open source projects. This led him to get hired at Behance for his contributions and become a Babel maintainer. This talk showed the attendees that they could start by making their first contribution, build a career around it, and transform their lives.
The festival left attendees informed about open source and inspired to make their first contribution. It also trended on Twitter and other social media platforms, thereby creating more awareness about Open source in Africa.
The big shift - OSCA chapter leads program
Even though we had attendees from other African countries, we noticed that most people who knew OSCA and what we were doing were Nigerians. Our organization's name was Open Source Community Africa, not Open Source Community Nigeria, so we knew we had to take a different approach.
We recognized that we couldn’t reach everyone in all the African countries or the local tech communities in each country, so we decided to launch the Chapter Leads program. In this program, selected community builders will create, grow, and support vibrant local OSCA communities in Africa.
Before the launch of this program, OSCA communities and events only happened in 3 states in Nigeria (Lagos, Uyo, and Port Harcourt). However, thanks to the OSCA chapter leads program, we now have 34 OSCA chapters in different African countries. These chapters have hosted various events within their local communities, helping us reach thousands of people and drive our mission to increase the number of Africans contributing to and creating open source projects.
The growth & impact of open source in Africa
The Open Source festival and the chapter leads program created a ripple effect that moved Africa from a continent with a handful of people aware of and actively participating in Open Source to a more active and vibrant open source ecosystem. Here are some success stories and use cases:
- According to the Octoverse report, in 2020, Nigeria became the top country with the highest growth of people using GitHub to contribute to open source. In 2023, the report shows that the number continued to grow, but this time, it wasn't just Nigeria but other African countries like Ghana, etc., showing that the chapter leads program did have an impact.
- At the next festival, hosted in 2022, one of the attendees from OSCAFest 2020 (Uchechukwu Obasi) shared how attending the event advanced his career. He highlighted how he came to the event not knowing anything about open source, left inspired and now aware of open source, became a full-time open source contributor, and eventually landed a job at Grafana because of his open source contributions. He tied his career growth to attending OSCAfest in 2020.
- The number of Africans successfully accepted into open source programs like Google Summer of Code, Google Season of Docs, and Outreachy drastically increased since 2020. There’s this tweet someone made the other day about the number of Nigerians who get accepted into the outreach internship. Here’s a tweet someone made in 2022 that 25 out of the 65 people selected for the Outreachy internship were from Africa. For context, this number was from zero to 2 before the OSCAFest or the chapter leads launch. In 2019, I was the only African accepted into the Google Seaon of Docs program, but today, the number has also increased.
- During the first OSCAfest in 2020, we had 800 attendees, and at the last open-source festival in 2023, we had more than 2000 attendees. This is a testament to the increase in awareness and interest about open source in Africa.
- Yes, our goal was to create awareness about open source, but much more than that, we wanted to have open source projects created by Africans. This happened, too. Some of these projects include Chakra UI, Danfo.js, and the Nuru programming language. In addition, there are repos compiling the different open source projects created and maintained by Africans like Made in Nigeria, Made in Kenya, Made in Ghana, and Made in Zambia.
The next phase of open source in Africa
When you look at the use cases I’ve shared, you’ll see that we achieved our goal to a certain degree. Unlike five years ago, African participation in the open source community has greatly improved. People are now aware of open source, and we’ve hosted events solely focused on open source, increased the number of our community members, chapter leads, and countries, hosted Sustain OSS events, and so much more.
We’ve successfully created awareness and increased the amount of creation and contribution. But the work isn’t done. We believe it is time to move into the next phase of open source in Africa, and this has led us to work on an acceleration program called the IDB program—ideate, design, and build — that we will launch soon.
Our goal for this program is to enable participants to accelerate their tech knowledge and become better professionals and collaborative team players by providing them with real-world work experience where they can engage in the ideation, designing, and development of open source projects. Stay tuned for it! 🎉
Aside from OSCA, others played a part too
So far, I’ve talked about the work that OSCA has done, but I’d be lying if I ended this article without highlighting the other Africans who helped to raise awareness of open source in Africa outside of OSCA. Here are some Africans whose work has increased awareness about open source in Africa:
Marlene Mhangami, who led the first PyCon Africa event, became the first African to be a vice chair of the Python Software Foundation and actively advocated for Open Source in Africa.
Prosper Otemuyiwa, who created a Laravel starter pack that trended more than Google and Facebook, has created several open source projects and continues to be a strong advocate for open source and tech in Africa.
Adewale Abati, also known as AceKyd, created the Made in Nigeria repo to showcase open source projects created by Nigerians. This repo will inspire people from other countries in Africa to create “Made in repos” that showcase projects from their country.
Peace Ojemeh brought a new light to contributing to open source as a designer when everyone kept thinking only software engineers could contribute to Open Source.
Without these people and many others I haven’t mentioned in this article, the open source ecosystem in Africa wouldn't be as active as it is today.
Summary
It is possible to do great things from a small place. Open Source Community Africa started as a small community in Lagos, Nigeria. But in five years, it went on to have an incredible impact on the African tech community.
We are still actively working on growing the open source ecosystem in Africa. There are still more countries to be reached and so many lives that can be changed. If you’d like to be a part of it, you can email me at edidiong@oscafrica.org. Thank you!