Where Did All the Zambian Developer Jobs Go?

Last Sunday I opened LinkedIn the way I do most weekends — coffee in hand, half-asleep, planning to scroll through job postings just to see what's out there. Habit, mostly. I'm not actively job-hunting. But I like keeping a finger on the market.

What I saw stopped me.

Compared to eighteen months ago, the volume of software developer postings for Zambian or remote-friendly roles felt dramatically lower. Not by a little. By a lot. Where in mid-2024 I'd see ten or fifteen postings I might actually consider, this Sunday I scrolled for ten minutes and found three. Two of them were the same role, posted by two different recruiters.

I texted three friends in Lusaka, 2 in Ndola and 1 in Kalumbila who work in tech to ask if they were seeing the same thing.

Then I started asking around more widely — group chats, WhatsApp threads, two people I bumped into at a tech meetup last month. Same answer everywhere: yes, it's quieter. Recruiters reach out less. Interview pipelines are slower. Offers that used to take three weeks now take six. The "remote developer at a great salary for a Western company" pipeline that was such a feature of 2021 and 2022 has narrowed into something that feels almost mythical.

So: this isn't in my head. And it probably isn't in yours either. The Zambian developer job market has shifted, and the shift isn't subtle.

The question I've been chewing on for the last few weeks is why.

This article is my attempt to think through that question honestly — to share what I've observed, what I suspect, and where I'm uncertain. It is not the definitive industry report. I don't have access to hiring data from every Zambian employer. I'm one developer trying to make sense of patterns I see around me. If you read this and have a different view from where you sit, I genuinely want to hear it — there's an invitation at the end.

This isn't just in your head

Before getting into the why, let me make the case that the shift is real.

I can't show you a clean dataset. The Zambian tech market is too informal and too small for the kind of analytics you'd get from a US-focused tracker like Layoffs.fyi. What I can show you is a pattern that holds across every Zambian developer I've spoken to in the last month:

Job postings have dropped. LinkedIn, Glassdoor, the Zambian-specific boards — all noticeably thinner than 2023-2024. The roles that are posted skew toward senior. Junior roles, which used to be the way most of us got our first paying gig, are scarcer.

Recruiter outreach has dropped. People who used to get one or two cold messages a week from international recruiters now get one a month, if that. Some of us have stopped getting them entirely.

When you do apply, the pipeline is slower. A friend interviewed for a remote backend role two months ago. He's still waiting on the third-round decision. Six months ago that loop would have closed in fifteen days.

The roles that survived are pickier. I see fewer "Senior React developer needed urgently" posts and more "Senior React developer with 7+ years, exposure to AI/ML pipelines, fintech experience, and strong written English required for a contractor role." The bar has crept up.

You can rationalise any single one of these into noise. Together they look like a market shift.

If you've been feeling slightly crazy about this — wondering if you missed an inflection point or if your CV has somehow gotten worse overnight — you haven't. Something changed.

The question is what.

Five things that might be happening

I've spent a few weeks turning this over and asking everyone who'll talk to me. Here are the five forces I think are at work, roughly in order of impact. Most of them are global. Some are specifically Zambian. They're stacked on top of each other, which is why the effect feels disorienting.

1. The 2022–2024 tech correction is still rippling outward

This is the biggest one, and the easiest to lose sight of because the headlines moved on a year ago.

Between late 2022 and mid-2024, US and European tech companies cut hundreds of thousands of roles. Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Twilio, Shopify, Coinbase, Lyft — all of them. By the most-cited public tracker, more than 400,000 tech roles were eliminated globally in that window.

Most of those layoffs hit American workers. But the second-order effect on developers like us was huge. Companies that had been hiring aggressively in Africa during the COVID boom — when remote was the default and dollar-paying employers were trying to source talent anywhere they could — pulled back hard. The marginal hire, the slightly riskier hire, the hire-someone-in-a-time-zone-we've-never-staffed-before hire — those were the first to be cut.

We're now eighteen months past the peak of those layoffs, and most of those companies have not gone back to aggressive hiring. They've shifted to "lean teams," "do more with less," "AI-augmented productivity." Whatever language the CEO uses on earnings calls, the practical effect is the same: a slot that used to be open for a Zambian backend developer is now either closed or being filled by an existing US employee being asked to ship more output.

This is cyclical. It will, eventually, swing back. But "eventually" in tech-cycle terms can be two to four years. We're not back yet.

2. AI is changing what entry-level work looks like

Now for the question you came here for. Yes, AI is part of this. But not in the way most clickbait headlines describe it.

AI hasn't "taken developer jobs" in the sense of mass unemployment for experienced engineers. What it has done is restructure how teams are shaped at the bottom rungs:

Senior engineers using tools like Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or ChatGPT are shipping more code per person. A senior who used to need two juniors helping is increasingly fine with one junior, or none.

The work that used to be the entry point — writing CRUD endpoints, basic React components, simple data transformations, glue code, repetitive refactors — is exactly what AI does well. The first six months of a junior's job description, in 2022, has been partly automated.

The skill bar has shifted upward. Companies want developers who can use AI effectively — who can review AI-generated code, prompt it well, catch its mistakes. That's a mid-level skill, not a junior one. It's hard to learn AI-collaboration without already being a competent developer.

So the AI effect is real but uneven. If you're an experienced developer worried about being replaced, the data so far doesn't support that fear — companies that fired their senior engineers and tried to run on AI have learned an expensive lesson. But if you're a junior trying to break in, the ladder has lost a few rungs at the bottom. Tasks that used to be "give it to the new hire" are now "have the AI draft it, have the senior review it."

This is the most important thing to internalise: AI hasn't eaten the developer profession. It has compressed the entry-level rung. And for a Zambian market that depended heavily on entry-level remote opportunities to give people a first international paycheck, that's a real squeeze.

3. The Zambian local economy

Even if every global trend reversed tomorrow, the local Zambian context would still be pressing on tech hiring from below.

The kwacha has had a rough couple of years. Inflation has eaten salaries — if you want to see exactly how much, our PAYE calculatorand our NAPSA calculator makes it grimly easy to do the math. Government revenue has been tight. The mining sector — which indirectly funds an enormous amount of corporate ICT spend in this country — has had its own pressures.

When a Zambian company is squeezed on revenue, the tech budget is often the first place they look to cut. Not because they don't value technology, but because most local companies are still treating it as a cost centre, not a profit centre. Marketing gets cut, IT contracts get renegotiated, planned digital projects get pushed to next year.

This has knock-on effects for the local developer market that don't show up on LinkedIn. The Zambian fintech that was going to hire three engineers in Q1? They're doing it with one. The bank that was going to commission a mobile app rebuild? They've pushed it to 2027.

You don't see these decisions as missing job postings. You see them as the slight, harder-to-pin-down feeling that "nothing is moving."

4. The structural friction in the remote-to-Zambia pipeline got more expensive

When hiring is hot, employers ignore friction. When hiring is cold, friction becomes an excuse to skip a candidate.

The remote-to-Zambia pipeline has always had structural friction that the boom years papered over:

• Tax complexity for international employers wanting to pay Zambian contractors compliantly
• Payment infrastructure that isn't as smooth as Nigerian or South African options
• Time zone gap with the US — Central Africa Time runs roughly nine to ten hours ahead of US Pacific time, which makes daily standups with a San Francisco team brutal
• Reputational unknowns — most international hiring managers couldn't name a single Zambian tech company they trust
• Network density — Nigerian, Kenyan, and South African developers have built deeper professional networks into Western tech, partly because there are more of them

None of this is new. What's new is that employers who would have ignored it in 2022 are now using it as a tiebreaker. If a hiring manager has a choice between a Zambian candidate and a Kenyan candidate of similar quality, the Kenyan often wins now — there are more existing reference points, well-known platforms have Nairobi operations, the payment infrastructure is more mature, the time zone is identical to South African teams the manager already works with, and the manager's existing team probably already has a Kenyan engineer who can vouch.

Nothing about this is a comment on the relative quality of developers. The Zambian engineers I know are as good as any I've worked with anywhere. It's purely about ecosystem signals that international employers can read quickly when they're being selective.

Friction matters more in a cold market. That's hurting us specifically.

5. The platforms that connected us to the world have cooled

A lot of the Zambian developers who got their first international remote job in 2020–2022 didn't get there through LinkedIn. They got there through Andela, Toptal, Turing, Deel, Remote.com, or some similar matching platform.

Most of those platforms have themselves been restructuring. Andela has gone through multiple strategic shifts. Toptal appears to have slowed senior hiring. Turing has shifted focus toward AI-training data work (which pays, but isn't the same as a permanent engineering role). The platforms that were the most common on-ramps for African developers into US contracts have either shrunk their pipelines or changed their model.

When the on-ramps narrow, the people who hadn't yet built direct relationships with international employers — which is most of us — feel it disproportionately. Our access channel got smaller.

The "nobody is moving" effect

There's one more piece of this that I almost left out, because I'm not sure I have it fully figured out yet. But I keep coming back to it.

When I look at the people in my own circle who I would normally expect to be changing jobs — switching companies for a 20% bump, taking a new role, moving to a different sector — most of them aren't. They're staying put.

There's a thing happening that doesn't show up in headlines about hiring contractions but I think matters as much: people aren't moving. The natural churn that creates opportunities for everyone else has slowed.

A few reasons I think are contributing:

Risk aversion. If you're in a job and you're not sure whether you'd find another quickly if a new role didn't work out, you stay. Even if the new role pays better. Even if you'd grow more. The downside scenario has gotten scarier, so the bar for moving has gone up.

Burnout. A lot of developers I know are exhausted. Pandemic-era overwork, two years of salary stagnation while inflation rose, the constant pressure to learn the next thing. Some of my smartest peers are deliberately choosing less ambitious career moves right now because they need rest more than they need growth. That's a perfectly rational individual choice that has a real aggregate effect on the market — promotions stall, lateral moves don't happen, the position above you doesn't open up because the person in it isn't going anywhere either.

Side hustles as a substitute for moving. People who would have changed jobs to grow their income are instead building side projects, freelancing on weekends, or starting small businesses while keeping the day job. (I'm one of them. This site is partly that.) This makes individual sense — multiple income streams are good — but it reduces the number of people actively looking for new full-time roles, which reduces hiring market activity for everyone else.

The cumulative effect is that the developer market in Zambia doesn't just have fewer postings — it has fewer people actively looking. Both sides of the market got quieter at the same time. That's why even active job-seekers are feeling slow pipelines: there's less heat coming off both ends.

This is the part of the analysis I'm least sure about. But it matches what I see when I ask developer friends "are you considering a new role?" and most of them say "honestly, not right now."

Where the market hasn't gone cold

I want to be careful not to make this article more pessimistic than the reality. The market is genuinely quieter, but it's not uniformly dead. There are pockets where Zambian developers are still finding good work — they just don't show up on LinkedIn.

Government digital transformation projects continue to fund developer roles, often through contractors. The pace is slow and the procurement is painful, but the budgets exist and the work is real. If your network intersects the Smart Zambia Institute or any of the ministries actively digitising services, that's a channel.

Health and NGO tech roles are still hiring, particularly anything tied to international donor funding. The Ministry of Health-adjacent ecosystem — surveillance systems, supply chain tools, electronic health records, mobile health platforms — is one of the steadiest sources of meaningful developer work in the country right now. These roles rarely get posted publicly.

African continental work is growing while Western remote shrinks. Companies serving the African market — fintech with pan-African ambitions, telcos building digital services, regional NGOs — are increasingly hiring Zambian developers because the time zone, culture, and customer understanding all align. The pay is below US-remote rates but above local Zambian rates, and the pipeline is more durable.

Senior developers with specific specialties still get inbound. If you're known for one thing — Postgres performance, mobile money infrastructure, ML on edge devices, anything narrow and deep — recruiters still find you. The market is cold for generalists. It's noticeably less cold for specialists.

None of this means the market is fine. It isn't. But "the market is fine" and "all the doors are closed" are both wrong. Some doors are still open. They're just not the ones LinkedIn shows you.

So what does this mean for us, right now?

I want to be careful here. I'm not a career coach. I'm a developer asking questions out loud. So instead of giving you advice, let me share what I see myself and my peers actually doing in response to this environment, and you can decide what makes sense for you.

Holding onto current jobs harder than before. Most people I know who have a decent job right now are putting more energy into being valuable in that job — taking on extra scope, learning new pieces of the stack, making themselves harder to cut — instead of looking for the next one. Risk-adjusted, this often makes sense.

Investing in side projects as both insurance and growth. A side project gives you something to put on a CV that AI didn't write, something to point at when an interview asks "what do you build outside work," and — if you're lucky — eventually a second source of income. Even small projects matter. The cost of starting one has never been lower. (If you're thinking about how to position those side projects on your CV, I wrote a piece on that recently.

Sharpening AI-collaboration skills deliberately. This is the unsexy advice but it's increasingly the right advice. The developers who will do best over the next three years are not the ones who avoid AI tools but the ones who use them well — knowing when to trust them, when to override them, how to architect work around them. If you haven't yet sat down with Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or ChatGPT for a full week of real coding and taken notes on what they're good at and what they're terrible at, that's an afternoon worth investing.

Looking at sectors that don't show up on LinkedIn. A lot of the most interesting tech work in Zambia right now isn't on LinkedIn. Government digital transformation. NGO tech roles. Local fintech. Mining digital teams. Most of these don't recruit through job boards — they recruit through who-you-know networks. If your current network doesn't intersect them, building that intersection is a higher-leverage move than refreshing LinkedIn for the hundredth time.

Considering depth over breadth. When the market is cold, generalists struggle more than specialists. The Zambian developer who is "okay at React, okay at Node, okay at Python" competes with everyone. The one who is "the person in this country I'd call if my Postgres replication is broken" has a much easier time finding work. Picking a thing and going deep is a viable strategy right now, especially if the thing is something AI tools can't do alone.

Being careful about who you say yes to. A cold market is when desperate-looking offers from unverified employers multiply. Be more careful, not less, when the pressure to take whatever comes along is high. I wrote about what to watch for here.

None of this is a silver bullet. I'm not telling you the market will turn around in three months if you do these things. I'm telling you what the people around me who seem least anxious are actually doing.

What I want to hear from you

This is one developer's view of one slice of the Zambian tech market in mid-2026. I'm sure I have things wrong. I'm sure I've missed things. The Zambian tech community is bigger and more diverse than my circle, and the picture from where you sit may look quite different from the picture I see.

So consider this an open invitation:

If you're a Zambian developer seeing a pattern that contradicts what I've written here — your part of the market is busy, your sector is hiring, your network is full of moving — tell me about it. I want to know what I'm missing.

If you're a recruiter or hiring manager, you have visibility into one side of this that none of us have. What does it actually look like from your seat? Are you posting fewer roles? Different kinds? Are Zambian candidates harder to find, or are there just fewer roles to fill?

If you're an employer in Zambia who's hiring developers right now and feeling like you can't find the right people, I'd especially like to hear that. The shape of this mismatch matters. (We can help you reach them through ZedHires, but more usefully, I'd like to understand what you're seeing.)

And if you're somewhere in the middle — between jobs, doing a side hustle, freelancing, holding pattern — I'd like to hear what you're seeing too. The "in-between" experience is one nobody writes about and everyone is living.

You can write to me at hello@zedhires.com. I read every message. If enough people respond with useful perspectives, I'd like to write a follow-up piece compiling what fifty Zambian developers are seeing in 2026. That kind of crowdsourced picture is the only honest answer to a question this big.

Until then, take care of yourself. Build the side project. Keep the current job. Sharpen one thing. And don't let the quietness fool you into thinking the world has lost interest in what Zambian developers can do — the market is cold right now, but markets thaw, and the people who used the cold months well will be the ones holding the best position when they do.

Bright Kapamulomo is a software engineer in Lusaka and co-founder of ZedHires.

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