The Nocode Movement
The Next Technology Revolution that Africa Needs
The rapid increase in the number of smartphone users around the world has contributed to an explosion in the development of mobile apps and other mobile based technology solutions.
It is estimated that there are now almost 9 million mobile apps available globally and recent growth has been driven by the increased smartphone penetration in emerging economies. Countries like India and China have seen significant growth in the number of locally relevant mobile apps. To truly understand the impact of mobile apps on the global stage, one just needs to look at the number of highly valued mobile app companies that have emerged in the last 10 – 15 years.
Africa has not been left behind and many app companies of African origin have found success with some attaining the highly coveted status of ‘unicorns’ – with valuations of over $1 billion.
Unfortunately, the way the mobile app industry works does not enable the development of solutions to solve the very basic challenges facing many local communities. This is because traditional mobile app development is very expensive, driven by the costs of technology infrastructure and of skilled software developers. Software developers are in short supply globally – an often-quoted statistic is that only 0.3% of the world’s population know how to code and the shortage is more acute in Africa.
Most mobile app companies often need to secure large sums of funding to pay for developers and the infrastructure. This means that they can only focus on solutions that have large addressable markets to ensure a return on investment for their funders. The outcome is that many local challenges that technology can solve never get any focus.
Nocode creates the opportunity for technology to address local challenges
Nocode is a method of building software applications (apps) by visually illustrating how the application looks and functions instead of using traditional programming languages. The two most amazing features of Nocode is that allows anyone to create apps without any programming experience and apps can be built very rapidly versus the traditional methods.
Nocode has seen strong grown in the last 10 years as demand for technology solutions came up against a shortage of skilled software developers. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic brought it to the fore as many people sought to build and deploy apps very quickly and affordably.
Why does Africa need a Nocode revolution?
Nocode puts the ability to build highly localized solutions into the hands of the people and allows them to deploy the benefits of technology rapidly and cheaply. It does not require large capital or specialized skills, just an internet connection, an understanding of the solution and some creativity.
A Nocode revolution has the potential to reduce the impact of Africa’s acute lack of technology skills, rapidly increase the production of locally relevant grown technology solutions and close the gaps to other developing markets such as India and China. Nocode developers will be able to rapidly build, fail, learn, iterate and improve their solutions.
The task that remains is to drive the Nocode movement across Africa. Some thoughts on doing this include training individuals on Nocode tools, problem solving techniques and design thinking, and incentivizing them to solve local challenges.
If the proliferation of the mobile phone put modern technology into the hands of all Africans, Nocode will enable them to use the mobile phone to deliver homegrown solutions to their everyday challenges.
