I’ve been in this industry for over fifteen years. I have watched Silicon Mountain go from a handful of developers clustered around UB Buea’s engineering faculty to a full-blown ecosystem that the BBC, TechCrunch, and CNN have called “Africa’s Silicon Valley.” I have covered the launches, the pitch nights, the partnerships with French telecoms, and the Series A rounds. I have written more stories about promising Cameroonian apps than I can count.
And in all that time, I have watched us miss the point.
Not entirely and not maliciously, but structurally and at a scale that should worry every CTO, policymaker, and engineer reading this. We’re celebrating code while importing the machines that run it. That’s a more elegant form of the same dependency we have been trying to escape for generations.
The Question Nobody at the Pitch Night is Asking
Walk into any tech event in Buea, Douala, Yaoundé, Nairobi, Lagos, or Accra right now. The energy and talent are real. The ambition is extraordinary. Bootcamps are producing developers faster than the market can absorb them. Think mobile money integrations, health-tech apps, agri-tech platforms, edtech dashboards — the continent is innovating at a pace that, ten years ago, would have seemed almost impossible.
But look past the screens. Look at the hardware.
The laptops on the table were assembled in China and designed in California. The sensors in the agriculture startup’s prototype were shipped from Shenzhen or Germany. The microcontrollers in the health-tech device were imported at a markup that makes local iteration almost financially impossible. The industrial boards powering the energy pilot were procured through intermediaries with lead times measured in weeks, not days.
Nobody in that room made those components. Nobody in that room is even thinking about making them. And that silence to the question “who built the machine?” is the single most important gap in Africa’s technology conversation right now.
I like the way Mbah Matt-Klaus Mushi, founder of the Hardware Innovation Valley Community in Cameroon, puts it in a recent article: “We are writing elegant code on hardware we had no hand in creating, for platforms we do not own, to serve markets that were not built with us in mind.” He’s right. And the implications run deeper than most in our ecosystem want to admit.
The Structural Problem Beneath the Software Boom
Let me be precise about what the software boom has delivered, because I don’t want to dismiss it. It has created jobs, connected young Africans to global markets, and produced genuinely world-class engineers. I know many of them personally. I have watched them grow from students in computer labs to CTOs of companies with users across three continents.
But a continent that produces only software is a continent doing the world’s digital labour. It processes, connects, and optimises, but fails to invent the underlying physical layer on which all of that work runs.
The economic argument here is not subtle. Germany, South Korea, Japan, and China did not become technology powerhouses by writing apps for other people’s hardware. They made deliberate, sometimes painful policy choices to build local manufacturing ecosystems. The result was technology sovereignty (the ability to shape global supply chains rather than depend on them).
South Korea’s investment in semiconductor manufacturing through companies like Samsung and SK Hynix was not accidental. Rather, it was a 40-year project backed by government policy and a willingness to absorb short-term losses for strategic gain over decades.
Africa is not making those choices. We’re making a different choice, mostly by default, mostly through inaction. And the cost is compounding.
When a Cameroonian startup imports a sensor from Shenzhen, capital leaves the country. When that sensor breaks, and there’s no local repair ecosystem, the startup either sources a replacement — more capital out — or it folds.
When the startup scales and needs 10,000 units, it’s entirely at the mercy of a foreign supply chain it cannot influence, cannot shorten, and cannot negotiate with from a position of strength. Every layer of that dependency is a structural vulnerability. And when a trade war, pandemic, sanctions regime, or a shipping crisis disrupts those supply chains, Africa feels it first and hardest, because it holds no cards.
I watched this play out with devastating clarity during the COVID-19 chip shortage of 2021 and 2022. Startups across Silicon Mountain that had embedded foreign microcontrollers into their prototypes found themselves unable to procure replacements. Projects stalled, and investors lost patience.
What I See at the Community Level
I’ve spent the last several years paying particular attention to the hardware side of Silicon Mountain. What I found was a small, fiercely capable community of engineers building physical things under conditions that would have broken most people.
Mushi’s description of his own early hardware journey caught my attention in a way few tech essays have. He describes learning from YouTube tutorials and technical datasheets because there was no local community to learn from, paying ten times the Shenzhen price for basic components, and absorbing the slow, expensive, occasionally-burnt-out trial-and-error that nobody mentions in the STEM education press releases.
That’s an accurate description of the hardware learning environment in Cameroon. I have seen it firsthand in university labs and community workshops.
What I have also seen is what happens when someone breaks through. Mushi describes building his first Arduino-powered robot car — simple, borrowed code, half-functional — and the moment the wheels turned for the first time. He calls it political, and he’s right. Every piece of physical hardware built locally by a local engineer is a small act of defiance against the assumption that this kind of work is not for people in places like this. It matters not because the robot is impressive, but because it’s real and proves the gap is crossable.
The Hardware Innovation Valley Community, which Mushi founded in 2019, is doing the slow, unglamorous work that most of Silicon Mountain has not yet prioritized: robotics training, electronics experimentation, IoT development, hardware prototyping, and edge computing.
Critically, it’s building the community infrastructure that makes individual learning scalable through mentorship networks, shared component access, and a culture of documented failure that healthy engineering ecosystems require.
But one community cannot carry this alone.
The Problems Only Hardware Can Solve
Here’s the part of this argument that lands hardest with CTOs and technical founders who are skeptical about the relevance of hardware to their work: Africa’s most pressing problems are, disproportionately, physical problems.
Soil moisture monitoring for smallholder farmers does not require a better app. It requires affordable, locally manufacturable soil sensors that can function without grid power. Automated irrigation does not require a more elegant algorithm. It requires locally serviceable actuators and low-cost valve controllers. Industrial automation for small manufacturers requires programmable controllers, machine vision components, and physical drive systems, none of which currently exist in any local supply chain.
A smart grid solution for a rural community? The software intelligence can be implemented, but the relay controllers, embedded systems, and current sensors are the physical spine of the solution. Without them, the software is a body with no skeleton.
Truth is, software built entirely on top of imported hardware is software that works at the pleasure of others. It’s not your intellectual property in any meaningful sovereign sense. The moment the hardware becomes unavailable, the software ceases to function. And that’s because you’ve built a building on someone else’s land, and they hold the deed.
What an Ecosystem Actually Requires
I want to be careful here not to reduce a complex structural problem to a simple call to action, because that’s how we’ve gotten into this situation in the first place.
The software boom was, in part, the result of well-intentioned people saying “we should code” without thinking about what coding is built on. A hardware revolution driven by the same shallowness would repeat the mistake.
An actual hardware ecosystem requires several things simultaneously.
It requires makerspaces with accessible components. I’m talking about physical spaces where engineers can prototype without the week-long import wait and the 10x markup. Cameroon has fragments of this. Not enough.
It requires university curricula that treat circuits and code as equal disciplines and not the current reality, where electrical engineering is often taught theoretically, with minimal hands-on prototyping time and no culture of iterative, fail-fast hardware development.
It requires import duty reform on electronic components. This is the policy lever that’s hardest to talk about in polite company, but is probably the most important. Right now, the duty regime makes iterative hardware prototyping financially punishing. A startup that burns ten sensor boards finding the right configuration, which is a completely normal part of hardware development, faces costs that simply do not apply to software iteration. You do not pay duties on a failed git commit.
It requires patient capital that understands hardware timelines. A hardware startup does not go from idea to product in six months. The investor community in Silicon Mountain, to its credit, is growing. But most of it is still calibrated for software timelines and software margins. Hardware investors need to think in years, not quarters.
It requires a culture of documented failure. Think shared schematics, published post-mortems, accessible datasheets in local languages, and community repositories of working designs. This is how hardware knowledge compounds across a community. It does not happen automatically. It requires deliberate institutional choices.
The Opportunity Already Being Missed
There’s a window here that will not stay open forever. The global semiconductor industry is actively restructuring. Supply chains that were concentrated in East Asia are being diversified. New fabrication facilities are being built in the United States and Europe. The geopolitical calculus around hardware sovereignty is shifting in ways that are creating opportunities for regions that position themselves correctly.
Africa is not yet in that conversation, but it could be. The continent has raw materials, including significant reserves of cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements, that are literally inside the devices we import back from abroad. The value extraction is almost baroque in its completeness: we export the minerals, import the finished hardware, use it to build software, and sell that software on platforms we do not own. At every stage, the value accumulates elsewhere.
A hardware revolution would begin to change that logic. This won’t happen overnight or without significant investment and significant patience. But the alternative, continuing to deepen our software capabilities while ignoring the physical layer, produces a ceiling that we will eventually hit, and hit hard.
A Direct Word to Decision-Makers
If you’re a CTO at a Cameroonian or African tech company reading this, the next time you reach for an imported component, ask whether there’s a local alternative, and if not, whether your company could be part of creating one. The answer will usually be no, not yet. But the question itself is worth asking, and the habit of asking it is worth building.
If you’re a policymaker, the import duty on electronic components is not a trivial tax on a luxury good. It’s a structural tax on the country’s capacity to build physical things. Reform it and fund makerspaces the way you would fund roads, as industrial infrastructure, not as charity.
If you’re an educator, the student who can wire a circuit and write the firmware to drive it is more valuable to Cameroon’s long-term economic independence than the student who can only write the app that talks to it. Build the lab, buy the components, and tolerate the burnt boards – it’s all part of the process.
And if you’re a student or a young engineer, Mushi puts it better than I can.
“Start with a breadboard. Burn a few components. Build something ugly and functional before you build something elegant.”
The robot that barely works teaches you things the perfectly designed app never will.
Tying It All Together
I want to close with something uncomfortable, because I think the tech journalism community, myself included, in earlier years, has been too celebratory and not critical enough.
We have spent a decade writing about Africa’s software boom as though it were an unambiguous good. In many ways, it is, but we have been insufficiently honest about what it is not. It’s not technology sovereignty or industrial independence. It’s not yet the kind of innovation that compounds into the capacity to build the next layer of technology from scratch.
The hardware revolution will not arrive in a shipping container from Shenzhen. As Mushi writes, it will happen in small workshops, crowded university labs, and community spaces, built by people who decided not to wait for permission.
The Silicon Mountain community has produced remarkable things. I’m proud of what I have watched it build, but I’m also impatient, and anyone who’s paying close attention should be impatient too.
We have the talent. The question is whether we will build the conditions to let that talent work on the right problems – the physical ones, the hard ones, the ones that actually close the gap.
