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Andela is serving Silicon Valley, not Africa 10 Jul 2016

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's (CZI) effort to lead a $24 million financing round into Andela, a start-up that recruits and trains software engineers in Africa for global tech companies, has been severally hailed as a deft move that will create opportunities in Africa. But popular approval can be misleading.
    
By investing in Andela, CZI fulfils one aspect of its goal, namely, to “advance human potential.” The investment round, joined by venture capital firms, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Spark Capital, Learn Capital; as well as impact investment firm, the Omidyar Network, is promoted as an opportunity to plug the shortage of software developers in Silicon Valley by bringing in technological talents from Africa.

Andela has a 10-year goal of training 100,000 software developers across the African continent, with 35 percent of them being female developers. With the investment, Andela plans to expand into a third African country before the end of the year, in addition to its offices in Lagos, Nigeria; and Nairobi, Kenya.

But if the highfalutin "meritocratic model of workforce development" used by Andela is not a recipe for institutional brain drain, I don't know what is. Andela's mission is to find and train the brightest young minds in Africa for Fortune 500 companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, 6Sense and suchlike. Africa is a continent that has suffered massive brain drain and Andela is fostering that problem further. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki has described Africa's brain drain as "frightening". He said 10 per cent of highly skilled African information technology and finance professionals have left the continent in recent years.

The reason there are more jobs than there are developers in Silicon Valley is that the San Francisco Bay Area of California is home to many of the world's largest high-tech companies. Jeremy Johnson and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, two of the co-founder of Andela, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal on December 4, 2015, in which they said, "Brilliance and talent are evenly distributed, opportunity is not." Jeremy and Iyinoluwa asked, rhetorically: "Is Africa Hiding the Next Mark Zuckerberg?" Mark Zuckerberg himself said in a statement he posted to announce the investment in Andela that he was lucky to be born in a wealthy country where he had access to computers and the internet. According to him, "If I had been born somewhere else, I'm not sure I would have been able to start Facebook – or at least it would have taken a lot longer and been more difficult."

Unfortunately, the Zuckerbergs investment in Andela is a negation of CZI's stated mission to “promote equality for all children in the next generation,” given that the Andela model is one that fosters the inequality between the developed countries and Africa. For one, over the past two years of its programme, Andela has accepted only 0.7 percent of over 40,000 applications it has received. A CNN Money report even cheerily tagged it a "startup more elite than Harvard." To be sure, the co-founders said they "founded Andela to find and train the top 1% of tech talent across the continent." In effect, Mark Zuckerberg is funding Africa's human capital flight.

The media blitz that followed the announcement of the CZI-led investment in Andela peddled the fanciful idea that as Andela fellows gain more knowledge and experience from working in other countries, they will return to their native countries to put that knowledge to use. This is one of the classical arguments that support migration of skills. Moreover, migrant workers are expected to send money back home. Studies show that remittances help poor countries get out of poverty. Nigeria was the sixth largest recipient of remittances in the world in 2015, as Nigerians living abroad sent back home a total of $20.77 billion last year. Some research also find that brain drain improves trade in goods and services.
    
But unfortunately, there is no evidence that Africa's share of global trade has increased with the increase in brain drain. For a region that trades mostly in primary commodities, Sub-Saharan Africa's share of world exports has actually decreased from 3.8 per cent in 1980 to 1.7 per cent in 2015. Brain drain undermines a country's human resource development, which is critical for competitiveness of African goods and services.

Indeed, a large number of Africans who migrated to study and work abroad have returned to the continent. But the effect of migration has been net negative. A 2013 United Nations report shows that one in nine Africans (or 2.9 million Africans) with a tertiary education was living in Western Europe, North America and other advanced countries. This figure represents a 50 per cent growth over the past 10 years, and it is higher than any other region in the world.

Tech brain drain, particularly, is a big problem for many developing as well as developed countries. There is significant tech brain drain in France so much that in September 2015, a group of successful French start-ups wrote an open letter pleading with tech whiz-kids who have been lured to Silicon Valley to return to Paris.

It would be nice to know what percentage of Andela fellows will actually return to their home countries. If and when they return, the dice will be loaded against them. An obvious implication of brain drain is that the probability of the hordes of African tech companies competing with U.S. tech giants is close to zero. And it makes no difference if the African tech start-up founders are Andela fellows. Currently, there is only one African tech company, African Internet Group (AIG), now rebranded as Jumia, that is valued at over $1 billion. Meanwhile, the total market value of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon – five of the dozens of U.S. tech companies on the Fortune 500 list – as of July 2016 is over $2.13 trillion, almost equal to Africa's total GDP of $2.45 trillion (2014).