The engineers doing the most interesting work on the continent are frequently not the ones employed by the companies that get covered. They are maintaining open source libraries in their evenings, running language communities that outlast the startups their members work for, and answering questions in Telegram groups that function as the real technical support layer for entire national ecosystems.
These communities have a measurable effect on what gets built. A city with an active, well-run community produces engineers who have seen more architectures and made more mistakes in public, and companies hiring there notice the difference.
Remote work changed the incentives
The rise of remote contracts for international employers pulled a great deal of senior talent out of local companies and into better-paid roles abroad without requiring anyone to leave. The effect on local salaries has been significant and the effect on local companies has been mixed: harder to hire, but a much larger pool of engineers who have worked to an international standard and brought that back.
What the communities need
Almost every organiser gives the same two answers when asked. Venue costs, which are trivially small and chronically unfunded. And travel, because the single most valuable thing a community can do is put its members in a room with people from another city, and flights within Africa remain absurdly expensive.
Neither is a technical problem. Both are cheap to solve and almost nobody is solving them.