Nairobi-based payroll and HR platform Workpay is growing, and remote work is a key catalyst. The company just expanded to Nigeria and opened an office in Lagos.
Workpay is a graduate of the Y-Combinator and Google for Startups Africa. And it was recently named a recipient of Google Black Founders Fund.
Workpay provides the basic tools for running a large workforce. It offers tools to hire, run local payrolls, file taxes, manage compliance, and pay salaries in more than 15 currencies across Africa.
This makes it a useful platform for organizations that want to hire remote teams, including international firms looking to hire Africa’s sought-after engineering talent.
Remote work, massively accelerated by Covid, has been a boon for African engineers, who can command high salaries working for international tech companies.
This has been great for the internationals. At the recent Localogy local search event in Los Angles, Afif Khoury, CEO of U.S.-based marketing automation platform Soci, revealed in an on-stage Q&A that the best recent engineering hires his company made were from Nigeria.
This is just one example of a tech company that discovered this previously untapped resource during the pandemic.
At the other end, African startups continue to struggle to compete for technical talent as they try to scale their businesses.
“There is quite a lot of talent, but in just the couple of years we've been around, it's gotten so much harder to access it,” said Martin Majlund, CEO of Kenyan eCommerce platform Sky.Garden in a recent BIG5D Podcast interview.
“And as far as the pricing, there is not a big discrepancy between hiring a European engineer and a Kenyan engineer now.”
Workpay says it is focused on helping African companies take advantage of the remote work opportunity.
“We are not only supporting some of the amazing companies in the continent like Flutterwave, Paystack, and Yoco but also the millions of SMEs in Africa in their growth endeavours,” said Workpay CEO/Co-founder Paul Kimani, in a statement picked up by multiple African tech news sites.
“What we are building is an infrastructure to allow SMEs to have the same advantage and tools to build their teams across the continent without breaking their banks.”