Paper short abstract:

We empirically estimate whether Sub-Saharan African programmers collaborate with others in the region resembling the flows of manufacture-led intra-regional trade, or with users outside the continent resembling the primary-commodity-led export flows.

Paper long abstract:

Regional integration and the expanding internal market hold considerable promise for the African development process. The region's demographic trends and the emergence of a middle class are amongst the developments that highlight the growth potential of intra-African trade. In 2014, high value added manufactured goods comprised 41 percent of African regional trade, while they only accounted for 15 percent of exports from the continent thus evincing the potential to contribute to value added, employment, and job creation. While the literature on growth prospects for Sub-Saharan Africa proposes fostering of services- and manufacture-led regional trade and integration into global value chains as some of the most promising policy directions, there's strong simultaneous push to invest in ICTs and Internet connectivity with the hope of transforming the region's countries into knowledge economies. While the development of industries based on technology and human capital affords hope in the region striving to leapfrog into higher value added activities, there is scant understanding about how the region's countries would integrate into the global knowledge economy. Investigating programming as a key knowledge-rich activity, we analyze a network dataset covering the structure of inter-country collaboration on the programming platform GitHub. We estimate whether Sub-Saharan African programmers collaborate with others in the region resembling the flows of manufacture-led intra-regional trade, or with users outside the continent resembling the primary-commodity-led export flows. Measuring regional integration in knowledge-rich activities is of interest to African policymakers who consider it an important pillar of the region's knowledge economy transformation and development strategy.