Built Here, Used Everywhere: Closing the African Open Source Founder Gap
African developers are now active contributors to open source — but there is a gap between showing up in someone else's repository and starting your own. The continent generates unique challenges that mainstream open source rarely addresses: mobile money infrastructure, offline-first connectivity, governance systems and financial realities that don't map to Western defaults. These aren't bugs to be patched — they're the brief for something entirely new. In this panel, 3 African developers who have made the leap from contributor to founder share what the journey actually looks like: what made them start, the challenges they encountered, and what it takes to build software rooted in African realities that earns a place in the global stack. Proposed Panelists OkJodom - Co-founder Bitsacco & Minmo Wisdom Nji - Co-founder SMSWithoutBorders Tim Akinbo - OG African Bitcoin Developer
