By Kehinde Ogundare, Country Head, Zoho Nigeria
Africa has always found its own way around barriers. When fixed-line
banking proved too slow and too exclusionary, Kenya did not wait for the
infrastructure to catch up. It built M-Pesa instead, a mobile payments
platform that by 2022 had 50 million customers across seven African
countries and processed nearly 20 billion individual transactions
annually.
That story is now so well-worn that it risks becoming a cliché. But it
contains a genuinely instructive logic: constrained circumstances,
properly understood, can become a design brief.
Today, Africa faces a new set of constraints, around software
development capacity, technical talent, and the cost of building digital
tools, demands exactly the same creative leap. Meeting these challenges
will require the same kind of practical innovation that previously
reshaped financial inclusion across the continent.
The numbers make the challenge plain. Africa’s internet economy was
projected to contribute $180 billion, [1] or 5.2% of aggregate GDP, by
2025. Meanwhile, cloud adoption is expanding at 25 to 30% [2] annually,
outpacing Europe and North America, while thousands of African companies
are already experimenting with AI-enabled operations.Yet, the human
infrastructure required to sustain this momentum is not keeping pace.
Unless the continent finds smarter and more scalable ways to build
digital systems, Africa risks becoming the world’s largest consumer of a
digital future it did not help design.
The build gap is structural, not incidental
Africa’s AI challenge is not a lack of ambition or demand, but the
widening gap between the pace of technological change and the
availability of skills needed to support it. Across the continent,
organisations are under growing pressure to build AI capability quickly,
as shortages in specialised talent increasingly affect innovation,
competitiveness, and the ability to fully participate in the global
digital economy.
A 2024 ICT Skills Survey found that more than 28,000 [3] high-end
developer and cybersecurity roles in South Africa had to be outsourced
because local talent was simply unavailable, with enterprises poaching
the same scarce professionals from one another in a cycle that drives up
costs and squeezes out the SMEs that form the backbone of most African
economies. Nigeria and Kenya, despite recording developer population
growth of 28% and 33% [4] respectively between 2023 and 2024, still
represent only a fraction of the global developer community.
The challenge is further intensified by the continued loss of skilled
talent to more developed markets, limiting the continent’s ability to
build and retain the expertise needed for long-term digital growth.
However, this is not simply a pipeline issue that can be solved through
education alone. It reflects deeper structural constraints, from uneven
investment in technical infrastructure and digital training to the high
cost of reliable connectivity and power instability. Across African
markets, many businesses and communities are still forced to operate
within systems that make full participation in the digital economy
significantly harder. These are not isolated operational challenges.
They are systemic barriers that risk slowing Africa’s ability to fully
realise the opportunities of the AI era.
Intelligent tools as strategic infrastructure
This is precisely why the emergence of AI-assisted low-code and vibe
coding approaches represents something more than a developer trend. It
represents a potential structural response to a structural challenge.
Vibe coding, a term popularised by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in
2025, refers to building functional applications through natural
language descriptions rather than conventional code. You describe what
you want; the system generates the structure, logic, and connections
required to make it work.
For the continent’s millions of entrepreneurs operating without a
developer on staff, this creates a genuine shortcut to working software,
whether it is a South African small business looking to digitise
operations, a Kenyan agritech startup building supply chain tools, or a
Nigerian SME trying to automate customer approvals and customer service
workflows.
Consider a small logistics company trying to manage deliveries across
multiple regions without the resources to hire a full development team.
AI-assisted low-code tools can help build routing dashboards, automate
customer notifications, and digitise inventory tracking in days rather
than months.
AI-assisted low-code development goes further still, bringing machine
learning, predictive analytics, and self-learning algorithms into the
development process, making it suitable not merely for quick prototypes
but for the scalable, data-intensive applications that banking,
healthcare, and logistics at continental scale genuinely require.
Recent research [5] found that Kenya’s approach to digital adoption,
characterised by grassroots digital literacy programmes and simplified
onboarding, demonstrates that informality need not be a barrier to
digital innovation. That finding points toward something important: the
tools that matter most in Africa are not necessarily the most
sophisticated ones. They are the ones that meet builders where they
actually are. A fast-moving startup operating out of a co-working space
in Lagos’s Yabacon Valley has different needs from an established
financial services firm in Cape Town navigating compliance requirements,
and both have different needs from the first-time builder in a smaller
city with no developer network at all.
What connects all three contexts is the principle that lowering the cost
and complexity of building software expands who gets to shape Africa’s
digital future. Africa requires massive scaling of its digital
workforce, with reports indicating that 650 million training
opportunities [6] will be needed to meet the demand for digital skills
across the continent by 2030. Traditional pipelines cannot close that
gap at the required speed. Tools that extend the productive capacity of
existing builders and draw non-technical entrepreneurs into the act of
building are critical.
Leapfrogging requires foundations, not just shortcuts
The risk, and it is a real one, is mistaking these tools for a
substitute for the deeper investments Africa still needs to make. As
analysts have argued, mobile money dramatically increased financial
inclusion but did not replace the need for a stable, well-regulated
banking sector, a tension that Nigeria’s rapidly maturing fintech
ecosystem is navigating in real time as it moves beyond its breakout
years.
The same logic applies here. Vibe coding and AI-assisted development
cannot paper over the infrastructure deficits that still constrain the
continent. Across many parts of Africa, inconsistent access to reliable
electricity and high-quality connectivity continues to shape who can
fully participate in the digital economy. While AI-powered tools may
lower technical barriers to innovation, their impact will ultimately
depend on broader progress in digital infrastructure, energy
reliability, and equitable access to technology and stronger governance
frameworks around cyber security and data sovereignty.
McKinsey has observed that Africa has a proven track record of
leapfrogging traditional development pathways, from mobile payments to
cloud adoption, often outpacing what established markets achieved
through slower, incremental routes.
What Africa needs, then, is not a choice between vibe coding and
AI-assisted development, nor between either of those and conventional
software engineering. It needs an intelligent layering of all three:
accessible, prompt-driven tools for the entrepreneurs and administrators
who need working solutions now; robust AI-assisted platforms for the
developers and institutions building systems that must scale across
borders and regulatory environments; and sustained investment in
producing and retaining the senior technical talent that no tool,
however intelligent, can fully substitute.
Africa’s AI market will be worth $16.5 billion by 2030 [7]. Whether
African organisations are building that future or merely consuming it
will depend on whether the means to build it are genuinely within reach,
across the continent’s established tech hubs and deep into the cities
and towns that sit beyond them.
