Examining the Growth and Progress of the AWS Community in West Africa and Africa — February 2023
Our team is passionate about providing a valuable and engaging experience for the AWS security community in West Africa. We believe in contributing to the growth of competent cloud security engineers and architects on the African continent, and we are committed to measuring the impact that we are having as a community.
We recently conducted an analysis on the public AWS Community Builders and AWS Heroes directory to provide you with some fascinating insights!
After analyzing the data, we discovered some interesting numbers that are worth sharing.
1. Currently, there are 176 builders and 4 heroes in the public directory, representing 15 countries out of the 54 on the continent. Nigeria has the highest number of builders, accounting for 47% of the total number, while Kenya and Egypt are tied at 16% each.
2. The two most popular categories are Machine Learning and Containers, with 18% each. Front-End Web & Mobile and Dev Tools come in third and fourth place, with 11% and 9% respectively. Our own area of focus, the Security & Identity category, accounts for 8% of the total number of community builders. We believe that there is a significant opportunity for growth in this category, and we are excited to see how it will develop in the coming years. We noticed that there are two categories that are not yet represented on the continent: Storage and Graviton Arm.
3. Out of the seventeen countries in West Africa, only three are represented in the public AWS Community Builders directory. Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo are the only countries with builders listed. Currently unrepresented countries in West Africa are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte D’Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. We hope to see them represented in the directory soon.
4. Now, let’s take a closer look at the numbers for the represented countries. As we previously mentioned, Nigeria has the highest number of builders, with a total of 83. Most of these builders are located in the major cities of Lagos and Abuja, with a few in other cities such as Port Harcourt and Ibadan.
Ghana, on the other hand, has only six builders listed, with the majority located in the major city of Accra.
Togo has two builders listed, with one each located in Lomé and another city that was not specified.
While we are excited to see that there are builders in West Africa, we believe that there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that more countries are represented in the directory. Our team is committed to contributing to the growth of the AWS security community in West Africa and across the continent, and we are looking forward to seeing how it will develop in the coming years.
We hope that this information has been useful and informative to you, and we encourage anyone interested in the AWS security community in West Africa to join us and help contribute to its growth and success!
