African Coders are More Suited for the ‘Gig Economy’ than their Western Counterparts
When we started with Tunga one of my biggest worries was that we couldn’t get enough quality software programmers within the communities we had started out with. On paper Tunga was a nice idea: connecting African coders to businesses that have a chronic shortage of software developers. But obviously this can only work if there is a group of these coders that is robust enough and that has a sufficiently diverse skill base.
So one of the first things we did was to mobilize people in Uganda and Kenya to consolidate the community and to find out if this critical condition could be met. My colleague Bart spent a full 6 months in Kampala and Nairobi gathering coders, talking to them, testing them and trying to build a first launching group of coders. The enthusiasm and commitment from the local developers was beyond our wildest expectations.
To test the waters, we organized a pilot test in the fall of 2015. With a very limited effort, we got 15 paying customers who paid roughly $200 on average. The pilot assignments proved to be more than enough to generate a number of important learnings and insights:
- all completed assignments were done so to the full satisfaction of the commissioning party. This told us that the quality of the coders we had mobilized is up to standard and in itself already rendered the pilot successful.
- a number of the clients were so happy that they immediately signed up for follow-up assignments. This told us that Tunga can address a real need.
- many of the clients indicated to us that they would prefer to have more flexibility which workflow tool to use (the pilot was focused on Github as a workflow tool). This told us that we had to try to make the task posting spectrum more generic (which by now we have done).
- the developers of the community were all very enthusiastic and were very eager for more work. This told us that we had a substantial commitment from the devs.
In short, the results were very encouraging. But in the process, we came to another conclusion: this type of ‘gig economy’ working arrangement very well fits the local culture. Whereas westerners generally prefer fixed working hours and salary, it seemed to be in the nature of the Tunga coders to work as it fits their schedule and to commit to a result instead of an effort. It appeared this cultural fit certainly contributed to the success of the pilot. So not only did the quality of the coding skills outreached our expectations, we accidentally found out our community of African coders is probably disproportionally well suited for the gig economy!
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