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Beyond the vibe: Bridging Africa’s Build Divide with Intelligent Infrastructure
By Kehinde Ogundare, Country Head, Zoho Nigeria
Africa has always found its own way around barriers. When fixed-line banking proved too slow and too exclusionary, Kenya did not wait for the infrastructure to catch up. It built M-Pesa instead, a mobile payments platform that by 2022 had 50 million customers across seven African countries and processed nearly 20 billion individual transactions annually.
That story is now so well-worn that it risks becoming a cliché. But it contains a genuinely instructive logic: constrained circumstances, properly understood, can become a design brief.
Today, Africa faces a new set of constraints, around software development capacity, technical talent, and the cost of building digital tools, demands exactly the same creative leap. Meeting these challenges will require the same kind of practical innovation that previously reshaped financial inclusion across the continent.
The numbers make the challenge plain. Africa’s internet economy was projected to contribute $180 billion, or 5.2% of aggregate GDP, by 2025. Meanwhile, cloud adoption is expanding at 25 to 30% annually, outpacing Europe and North America, while thousands of African companies are already experimenting with AI-enabled operations.Yet, the human infrastructure required to sustain this momentum is not keeping pace.
Unless the continent finds smarter and more scalable ways to build digital systems, Africa risks becoming the world’s largest consumer of a digital future it did not help design.
The build gap is structural, not incidental
Africa’s AI challenge is not a lack of ambition or demand, but the widening gap between the pace of technological change and the availability of skills needed to support it. Across the continent, organisations are under growing pressure to build AI capability quickly, as shortages in specialised talent increasingly affect innovation, competitiveness, and the ability to fully participate in the global digital economy.
A 2024 ICT Skills Survey found that more than 28,000 high-end developer and cybersecurity roles in South Africa had to be outsourced because local talent was simply unavailable, with enterprises poaching the same scarce professionals from one another in a cycle that drives up costs and squeezes out the SMEs that form the backbone of most African economies. Nigeria and Kenya, despite recording developer population growth of 28% and 33% respectively between 2023 and 2024, still represent only a fraction of the global developer community.
The challenge is further intensified by the continued loss of skilled talent to more developed markets, limiting the continent’s ability to build and retain the expertise needed for long-term digital growth. However, this is not simply a pipeline issue that can be solved through education alone. It reflects deeper structural constraints, from uneven investment in technical infrastructure and digital training to the high cost of reliable connectivity and power instability. Across African markets, many businesses and communities are still forced to operate within systems that make full participation in the digital economy significantly harder. These are not isolated operational challenges. They are systemic barriers that risk slowing Africa’s ability to fully realise the opportunities of the AI era.
Intelligent tools as strategic infrastructure
This is precisely why the emergence of AI-assisted low-code and vibe coding approaches represents something more than a developer trend. It represents a potential structural response to a structural challenge.
Vibe coding, a term popularised by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in 2025, refers to building functional applications through natural language descriptions rather than conventional code. You describe what you want; the system generates the structure, logic, and connections required to make it work.
For the continent’s millions of entrepreneurs operating without a developer on staff, this creates a genuine shortcut to working software, whether it is a South African small business looking to digitise operations, a Kenyan agritech startup building supply chain tools, or a Nigerian SME trying to automate customer approvals and customer service workflows.
Consider a small logistics company trying to manage deliveries across multiple regions without the resources to hire a full development team. AI-assisted low-code tools can help build routing dashboards, automate customer notifications, and digitise inventory tracking in days rather than months.
AI-assisted low-code development goes further still, bringing machine learning, predictive analytics, and self-learning algorithms into the development process, making it suitable not merely for quick prototypes but for the scalable, data-intensive applications that banking, healthcare, and logistics at continental scale genuinely require.
Recent research found that Kenya’s approach to digital adoption, characterised by grassroots digital literacy programmes and simplified onboarding, demonstrates that informality need not be a barrier to digital innovation. That finding points toward something important: the tools that matter most in Africa are not necessarily the most sophisticated ones. They are the ones that meet builders where they actually are. A fast-moving startup operating out of a co-working space in Lagos’s Yabacon Valley has different needs from an established financial services firm in Cape Town navigating compliance requirements, and both have different needs from the first-time builder in a smaller city with no developer network at all.
What connects all three contexts is the principle that lowering the cost and complexity of building software expands who gets to shape Africa’s digital future. Africa requires massive scaling of its digital workforce, with reports indicating that 650 million training opportunities will be needed to meet the demand for digital skills across the continent by 2030. Traditional pipelines cannot close that gap at the required speed. Tools that extend the productive capacity of existing builders and draw non-technical entrepreneurs into the act of building are critical.
Leapfrogging requires foundations, not just shortcuts
The risk, and it is a real one, is mistaking these tools for a substitute for the deeper investments Africa still needs to make. As analysts have argued, mobile money dramatically increased financial inclusion but did not replace the need for a stable, well-regulated banking sector, a tension that Nigeria’s rapidly maturing fintech ecosystem is navigating in real time as it moves beyond its breakout years.
The same logic applies here. Vibe coding and AI-assisted development cannot paper over the infrastructure deficits that still constrain the continent. Across many parts of Africa, inconsistent access to reliable electricity and high-quality connectivity continues to shape who can fully participate in the digital economy. While AI-powered tools may lower technical barriers to innovation, their impact will ultimately depend on broader progress in digital infrastructure, energy reliability, and equitable access to technology and stronger governance frameworks around cyber security and data sovereignty.
McKinsey has observed that Africa has a proven track record of leapfrogging traditional development pathways, from mobile payments to cloud adoption, often outpacing what established markets achieved through slower, incremental routes.
What Africa needs, then, is not a choice between vibe coding and AI-assisted development, nor between either of those and conventional software engineering. It needs an intelligent layering of all three: accessible, prompt-driven tools for the entrepreneurs and administrators who need working solutions now; robust AI-assisted platforms for the developers and institutions building systems that must scale across borders and regulatory environments; and sustained investment in producing and retaining the senior technical talent that no tool, however intelligent, can fully substitute.
Africa’s AI market will be worth $16.5 billion by 2030. Whether African organisations are building that future or merely consuming it will depend on whether the means to build it are genuinely within reach, across the continent’s established tech hubs and deep into the cities and towns that sit beyond them.
The need for Nigeria to think outside the box in its need to drive towards global relevance with innovations and scientific developments will be on the front burner at the NITRA Innovative & Scientific Conference scheduled to hold on Thursday July 23, 2026 in Ikeja, Lagos.
NITRA
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) will lead other delegates to discuss and take far-reaching decisions at the event, which has its theme as “Bridging Nigeria’s Digital Divide With Scientific Innovation”.
Other companies that have indicated interest in partnering with NITRA include mobile communications company, Tecno; Africa’s premier end-to-end AI solutions company, Hyperspace; and telecommunications data infrastructure company, Digital Realty.
Speaking on the proposed event, the Chairman, Nigeria Information Technology Reporters Association (NITRA), Chike Onwuegbuchi noted that the event will seek to create a platform for government and private organisations to deliberate on policies around scientific innovations in Nigeria, challenges, place of indigenous and foreign collaboration, roles of each stakeholder, and grassroots development in that regard, among others.
According to him: “The Federal government, with series of programmes and partnerships, has established the urgent need to create an ecosystem that thrives on scientific innovation, breeding institutions and individuals with a target of placing the country at the fore-front of Next-Gen development.
It is a known fact that digital and scientific innovations are crucial, not only to the survivability of a nation, but also to the sustainability of its growth and development, with significant effect on economic strength, global image, defense and security, government capabilities to function, and public health and safety, communication and digital footprint, among others.
The federal government is actively driving scientific innovation to foster economic diversification and build a $1 trillion economy by 2030. Efforts are heavily focused on commercializing research, establishing massive research funds, and funding strategic infrastructure, particularly in technology, biotechnology, and healthcare. Core government initiatives and policies include the newly instituted National Research and Innovation Development Fund (NRIDF), which aims to mobilize about $500 million annually to support research and the commercialization of scientific outputs; and the Nigeria Genomic City, a multi-ministerial initiative aimed at transforming Nigeria into a leading hub for genomics, precision medicine, and biotechnology. It is designed to protect indigenous data, stimulate artificial intelligence in health, and develop a highly skilled scientific workforce.
According to the General Secretary of NITRA, Mr. Chidiebere Nwankwo, the forum will also be a vehicle to propagating the views of decision makers to the public, thereby furthering the cause of public awareness and information dissemination on the topic.
The focus, he said will be on how Nigeria can sustain digital innovative growth and scientific development in Nigeria
The board of global payments company, PayPal, says a 53 billion dollars takeover offer from financial technology firm, Stripe, and private equity company, Advent International, does not adequately reflect the company’s long-term value.
PayPal
According to reports, the proposed acquisition, valued at 60.50 dollars per share, remains under consideration, with the board yet to formally respond to the offer.
The directors are said to be evaluating not only the financial value of the proposal but also the structure of the financing, the timeline for completing the transaction and the likelihood of obtaining regulatory approvals.
They are also considering the possibility of competing bids emerging.
Although the offer represents a premium of about 28 per cent above PayPal’s recent share price, the board believes the company could deliver greater value to shareholders if its ongoing turnaround strategy succeeds.
Following reports of the bid, PayPal shares gained about two per cent to close at 56.73 dollars.
Sources familiar with the discussions said Stripe and Advent have secured approximately 50 billion dollars in debt financing from JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, while both firms would jointly contribute 17 billion dollars in equity.
Under the proposal, the two companies would jointly own PayPal instead of dividing its operations.
PayPal, Stripe, Advent International, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have all declined to comment on the proposed transaction.
The discussions come as PayPal seeks to strengthen its business after years of increasing competition from rivals including Apple Pay, Google Pay and emerging financial technology firms.
The company, which was valued at about 360 billion dollars in 2021, now has a market capitalisation of approximately 36 billion dollars.
Since assuming office as Chief Executive Officer in March 2026, Enrique Lores has embarked on a restructuring programme aimed at improving operational efficiency and restoring growth.
The restructuring includes the creation of three business divisions comprising Checkout, Venmo and Consumer Financial Services, and Payments and Crypto.
The company is also targeting 1.5 billion dollars in cost savings through the deployment of artificial intelligence technologies.
PayPal’s latest financial results indicated signs of recovery, with first-quarter revenue rising seven per cent year-on-year to 8.35 billion dollars, while total payment volume increased by eight per cent to 464 billion dollars.
If approved, the transaction would combine two of the world’s largest digital payments companies.
The combined business would process an estimated 3.7 trillion dollars in annual payment volume, significantly strengthening its position in the global online payments market.
However, analysts expect the proposed acquisition to face intense regulatory scrutiny because of the companies’ combined market share in merchant payment services.
To address possible antitrust concerns, the bidders have reportedly considered options, including separating PayPal’s Braintree business or other assets if required by regulators.
Sources said Stripe and Advent remain interested in pursuing the acquisition despite the board’s reservations, although negotiations are expected to continue.
Market observers are also awaiting PayPal’s earnings report scheduled for July 28 for further indications of the company’s financial recovery and future growth prospects.
Concerns over network reliability and its impact on Nigeria’s growing creator economy took centre stage at MTN Nigeria’s Data on Trial event, where content creator and streamer, Jarvis, challenged telecommunications operators to improve connectivity for digital creators.
Speaking during the event, Jarvis asked whether there were locations in Nigeria where uninterrupted internet connectivity could support real-life (IRL) streaming without network disruptions.
“Are there places where there is no breakage when streaming IRL?” she asked.
Her question highlighted the challenges faced by content creators who depend on stable internet services for live streaming, content uploads and real-time engagement with audiences.
Responding, MTN Nigeria’s Chief Technical Officer, Mr Yahaya Ibrahim, said network performance depends on several factors, including location, network coverage, device capability and the number of users connected to a particular base station.
He noted that operators continue to invest in expanding network capacity to meet the growing demand for data services.
Earlier, MTN’s General Manager, Network Performance and Quality Assurance, Mr Michael Ndukwe, explained the evolution of mobile network technology in Nigeria, from first-generation (1G) services to the current fifth-generation (5G) technology.
According to him, each phase of technological advancement has significantly increased network capacity and enabled new digital services.
Ndukwe cited Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) data showing that Nigerians consumed about 13.2 million terabytes of data in 2025.
He added that data usage reached approximately 4.06 million terabytes in the first quarter of 2026, reflecting the country’s increasing reliance on digital platforms and online services.
According to him, the growth is being driven by wider adoption of 4G and 5G networks, increased smartphone penetration, the proliferation of smart devices and expanding use of social media platforms.
Participants at the event noted that as more Nigerians build businesses and careers around digital content, access to reliable and high-speed internet has become critical to sustaining the country’s digital economy and creator ecosystem.
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