 Hi, I'm Albuquerque Siddiq Ango, Developer Evangelizing Program Manager at GitLab. In this session, I'll be sharing with you how you can improve the impact of your diversity initiatives in Africa. A little bit about myself. I'm an engineering-based currently in the Netherlands, and my interests include Kubernetes, CIC, the GitOps, and DevSecOps. You can find me on Twitter, at CIRC247. I'm also a community organizer. One of my recent activities include leading the organization of the Kubernetes Community Days Africa. Now, let's proceed first to learn about Africa as a continent. Oftentimes, you hear a lot of people speak about or refer to Africa like one country that all of us belong to, or you sense the ignorance of a lot of people in the West, in the Americas or Europe, about the continent of Africa. The continent of Africa is composed of 54 sovereign nations, countries that speak diverse languages. And I think because of the lack of data that most people lack of knowledge about the continent, it's often assumed that it's one place that they can just visit, or if they visit Kenya or South Africa, it's more like they know about the whole of Africa. Oftentimes, I've been asked if I say, oh, I'm from Nigeria, oh, that's Africa. And I'll be asked to references about things that when I digest, I was, OK, you're probably referring to Kenya or you're referring to South Africa, and you sense the ignorance in the person because he thought it's all the same thing. But Africa is very diverse. Now, let's see the different parts of Africa. One, North Africa. But this is mostly composed of Arabian-speaking countries like Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Western Sahara. They are often classified together with Middle Easts and called MENA, that is Middle East and not Africa. And most of the countries belong to the Arab League. Now, the next one is Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa are countries that are to the south of North Africa and composed of most of the countries within Africa. Now, within Sub-Saharan Africa, we have West Africa, which includes Nigeria. We are from Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger Republic, Mali, Mauritania, and a host of other countries. Now, out of the 400 million people in West Africa, Nigeria is composed of like 40 to 50% of that. And there are loads of languages that are spoken within West Africa. I personally speak Hausa, Yoruba, English, and a bit of Arabic. Now, then we have Central Africa. A lot of people here, quite a lot about the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan. There are lots of other countries within Central Africa. Then we have East Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Somalia, Ethiopia, and so on. Then we have Southern Africa, with South Africa being the most prominent among the countries in Southern Africa. Now, these are the countries in Africa. Africa is not Wakanda. It's not just one country. It's a huge continent with lots of countries. Because literally, I think the last time I traveled from Nigeria to South Africa, Cape Town, I flew six hours to get to South Africa. So it's a very large continent. Now, to the main part of my talk, which is how do you improve your diversity initiatives in Africa? We've seen that Africa is a huge continent, more than a billion people. But how do you now craft or create these diversity initiatives to have impact on the continent? The first things are, what are your objectives from the first place? What are you trying to achieve? Is it just publicity stunts so that the media will say, oh, this company is doing something in Africa or doing some diversity initiatives? Are you just interested in adding more numbers to the KPIs you are sharing for your stakeholders? Or are you creating some form of talent pipeline for your company and creating more talents that you can recruit or bring into the industry? Or are you trying to create visibility for your solution or your products that you are trying to sell? What you are trying to achieve goes a long way in defining the kind of result you have from your diversity initiatives. It is very important for you to clearly research and define your objective, then set the right KPIs that you want to achieve. If it's just numbers, you can get numbers, you can, I've seen events or programs that are organized mainly for numbers, a ton of people show up. But at the end of the day, you don't see the impact, you don't see what exactly was the company trying to achieve and everything boils down to, oh, they were probably just after the publicity. So it's important to get this right. Whatever you try aside this depends on your OKR. What is your objective? What is the key results you are looking for at the end of the day? And how do you identify that you've achieved this curiosity? What is the key performance indicator that you want to see from the initiatives you are trying to create? Now, the next thing is the diversity. You need to understand how diverse the continent is. We've seen language. Most of us are most of the continents that are used by projects and initiatives is English. English is just a small part of the language spoken on the continent. I think it's around 13% or something. So it is important to understand that if your content is mainly in English, you are only reaching a subset of the continent. Then gender, right from the beginning, your initiative should take into consideration how gender is perceived, how gender is handled and how you can reach more. Taking into consideration that there is a lot of cultural differences even within a particular country. Then region, this is where a lot of countries get it wrong. You are doing an initiative. You call it, okay, let's say for example, White Heart Hacking Africa. But all your speakers, all your focus, all the influencers and all the people that are driving this initiative are based in Nigeria or they are based in Kenya or they are based in South Africa. You stand the risk of it just being in that country instead of being a continent-wide event, one country against 53 other nations. So it is important for you to understand, okay, who are your audience? How do you intend to reach them? How can you effectively reach as many people as possible within the continent? You can probably make it in more regional events within Africa, like West Africa or East Africa or North Africa or Southern Africa because some of the countries within this region are kind of closely meet and they tend to, content tend to circulate more within those regions than you just pick in a specific region and expect the impact to radiate to the rest of the continent. It won't just work. Now, then to do more into the language diversity, like I was sharing earlier, 17% of the continent speaks Arabic and mostly in the northern part of Africa, which is like the top region, the northern region of Africa, 13% speak English. And these English are mostly official language, not local languages. 11.5% speak French as official language. 10% speak Wahili, both as local and as official. Then 5% speak Hausa, mostly in Western Africa. This is just like top 5%, the top five of the languages that are spoken on the continent. There are thousands of other languages across different regions, but if you want to reach more people, these are the languages you need to focus on, not just English. So it is important that, for example, if you take Cameroon, Cameroon has the anglophone part and the francophone part. So if your content is mainly in English, you stand the risk of not reaching a whole lot of other people that might benefit from your content. And anytime you are creating initiatives, it is important to also take note the different language barriers. Someone who speaks English might not be good at the English because it's probably a secondary third language. So it is important to take into consideration how people, the type of language people speak and how you can easily reach them. Now, the next thing is traveling. Traveling is hard within Africa and when you want to travel out of Africa. So a lot of sponsorship, I've seen a lot of sponsors who were, hey, we want students to attend KubeCon, we are giving out free tickets, sponsorship tickets, but these tickets you are giving free is nothing compared to the amount of stress, the amount of money and so on that will be required for people to travel out of Africa. In Europe, it's easy to travel because it's cheaper, I've traveled less than 100 Euro from one country to another within Europe. Within Africa, getting visa is a problem. I personally have been denied visa up to 10 times by different countries to US, within the EU and so on. There are countries I don't even bother any longer to even try to travel to because of my issues getting visa. But once I moved to Europe, things got a bit easier, but it's not everyone that can move to Europe. It's very expensive traveling out of Africa. For example, there was a time I did a bit of research and noticed because I'm based in Nigeria, it is cheaper for me to travel Amsterdam, Abuja, Amsterdam than to travel Abuja, Amsterdam, Abuja, probably due to taxes, due to fuel and a lot of other things. So it is important to take all this into consideration. And also it can be very difficult to travel from one point in Africa to another. I've traveled to Africa once where the only option I had was to use Emirates to travel to Dubai then to keep them. I know of someone who wanted to attend a conference and had to travel to Europe before getting to Africa. It's, Nigeria is very close to Nigeria, but most times when I'm checking for flights that can travel to Nigeria, if I don't want to take the more than a day long trip, which can be really dangerous, it's only Air France that flies to Nigeria most times. So it's very, very difficult. So when you are creating your initiatives and you are looking as people moving around, taking into consideration that it can be very hard to travel within Africa. Now the next thing is, how do you intend to move this initiative along the way? When you start, okay, probably you are trying to get visibility for a technology or for a project. Where do new people start from? Then what's the next thing? How do they pipeline? How do they move along to learn different stages of this technology and evolve and grow within it? There has been several times where in the name of empowerment, a lot of technologies are introduced to people. Let's say for example, Android development. Most of the initiatives that are introduced and that is introduced to people who probably have never used Java before, don't have very sound knowledge of computing, then you expect them to start building Android applications and to start shipping apps to the Play Store. Things have gotten better, but you stand in chance of losing a lot of people to, this is complex, this is hard. What sort of pipeline are you creating? Once someone learns Kubernetes, what's the next thing? What are their mentorship for them? Are there ways they can get into projects? How do they get into projects? You want people to contribute to the, let's say for example, the Kubernetes project. Where do they start from? Where do they evolve? Where do they get mentorship? Where do they access resources? It is important to be specific with how you intend all these initiatives to introduce, to progress with people, not just to throw things at them and expect results. Now the next thing is, prioritize having remote or hybrid. One thing I've seen, or I've learned from the recent lockdowns and pandemics, it is easier to reach more richer content, to get speakers, to get quality speakers, to get diverse speakers, to get lots of participants. If we look at from the last physical events that was held for KubeCon to the KubeCon EU of 2020 to this that's happening, you will notice the surge in participants and speakers that are able to attend because the travel barrier is no longer there. And a whole lot of the visa issues, the visa limitations are no longer there. So more people are able to participate and engage. So it is important to prioritize remote or hybrid. Hybrid in the sense where probably you have viewing parties where people can participate in awesome clusters of events within different regions. This will make people where you have your diversity initiative to be able to contribute and participate more in whatever you are trying to do. The next thing is, most initiatives tend to use influencers within a community, especially in Africa, to reach more people or to push their content more. Yeah, it is extremely important and they can help in pushing down your resources or content down to the right people, but be cautious because sometimes a lot, we've seen a lot of situations where the product gets, or the initiative gets represented poorly or because the influencers have some different agendas or different initiatives that they are pursuing or they might not represent what you are trying to achieve or the objectives or the policies or the credits that you have as a company or organization. The end of painting your initiatives in a bad light or creating a scenario where you have to now initiate some disaster control initiative. So be careful how you use influencers. Now, the next thing is partner with existing communities. There are communities who have built networks, who have built structures within the continent. For example, the Google developer groups, they have organizers in a lot of countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the developer students group have organizers in schools all over Africa. She called Africa has a great initiatives for ladies and women all over Africa and so on. Oscar does a lot of awesome work at an open source community in Africa. The Facebook developers are who has a huge network of developers. So instead of starting your own initiatives right from the ground again and it becomes more expensive to maintain and a huge overhead for you, you can partner with some of this organization so that you can hit the ground running and move more faster than you having to look at the stress of starting your own initiative all over again. Next thing is understand the challenges that are inherent in Africa before demanding too much or before setting unrealistic expectations. One, internet is a huge problem. Yes, in the Netherlands, my internet service is one gigabit per second. If that is a huge luxury, even for a company in Nigeria, if I will speak specifically for Nigeria, not to talk of an individual. There are times where you struggle to get kilobits per second. So anytime you are setting your expectations or setting anything that requires certain results, be reasonable in how you set those expectations because you know the internet is not as great as yours and you can incentivize where necessary if you are working with people who are struggling with internet or enable them to be able to make a advantage of hubs or communities by engaging with those communities, engaging with those hubs to enable your target audience. Not just expecting that, hey, your audience will have the resources to deploy Kubernetes or to build Docker images out of the blue or to download your one gigabit resources one gigabit resources that you've provided. Power is a problem, a huge problem. For example, some parts of Africa, for example, like in Nigeria, where electricity is a huge problem. You can stay for days without power. So be mindful of when you are setting your expectation around the results to know that there can be power problem. People can face power issues. Security can be a challenge. While you should be mindful of what you see in media and what you read in the media because one thing is a lot of Western media are based in their country. So they have a lot of news to focus on in their country and a small fraction of time to focus on news, international news from other region. So they tend to highlight the negative or those news that are important for their ratings instead of reporting some of the awesome and great things that are happening. So you tend to see a lot of bad and less good from the continent. There is a lot of awesome activities and programs that are happening within the continent. But if you are not looking, you will see them. These are just to name a few of the challenges. Do your research. Work with the communities to understand what issues they are having before you set your expectation. The next thing is prioritized mentorship over events. A lot of communities want to focus on events. Let's hold these, let's hold that. Instead, focus on mentorship. For example, like most of the CNCF projects have different mentorship at different level for people who have been learning but want to actively engage with the community or contribute, can start by learning from those who are already established within the community and grow. The next thing is showcasing thought leadership on the continent. There are lots of people doing awesome things but we tend to focus on those who are still trying to learn or those who don't have the knowledge yet instead of also highlighting and showcasing those who have already done great and awesome work for the community. That way we even raise people to become mentors within the continent and to also be role models for others within the continent to look up to instead of every time trying to come in and help. The last thing is, I want to talk about is is a thin line between helping and unconscious savior mentality which is a very huge problem we deal with in Africa. Most times people come with good intentions and they want to really create and support but the way it is being presented or the way it is being offered is more about let's help these poor people who don't have anything, they who are suffering, who are doing this and that and it usually comes from not really studying and understanding the reality of situations on ground. So you end up wasting your resources because you had the wrong information, you don't have data, the right data to understand the situation of things on ground. We are not engaging with partners on ground. You think the same solutions that have worked with American countries or the European countries are still the same solutions that work in Africa. At the end of the day, the whole initiative goes down the drain. So it is important for you to engage with partners to understand what is the situation on ground instead of those blindly creating an initiative and expect to get results. Listen, understand the audience. Don't just shove things down their throat. Set realistic goals and expectations. It's not like in the EU or the Americas where everything they have, there's this type of hardware, I put it enabling environment that's already been created and makes it easy for other things to grow and start. So when you are not bringing your own initiative, they already have a good foundation to start on. In Africa, in some places in Africa, you have to set the foundations yourself or build on certain foundations that have been created by some organizations. If only you asked. Then maintain a pipeline. What happens next from your initiative when you introduce it at first? What's the next thing? Is it just to hold the event and that's all, it's gone? What's the next? Are you building some form of partnership? Are you building some form of pipeline where you can get more talent, grow the talent, then take them into organizations or into projects? You need to clearly define that and make sure the pipeline is maintained and sustained. So these are the important things you need to really, really look into before pushing your initiative down. Understand the continent. Know more about the continent. Engage with reliable partners, not just anyone who has a good profile on Twitter. Verify their successes, work with other people who have demonstrative results. Don't just go for online personas, people who really, really, really want to push things down the continent. Understand the diversity of the continent is extremely important. I will go a long way in you at even more success in whatever initiative you want to bring to the continent. Thank you very much. And I will be available for questions in the chat and if you have more questions, you can reach me on Twitter at circuit247 and more information about me is on my website. Thank you and goodbye.