Gartner recently unveiled its top predictions for IT organizations and users in 2022 and beyond.

Africa will become an innovation hotbed in the next five years as an influx of developers turns the continent into a "world-leading start-up ecosystem," according to Gartner.

The analyst predicts that a 30% increase in developer talent in Africa, which has in recent years seen an influx of venture capital funding, will see the region evolve into a software development powerhouse rivalling Asia by 2026.

Developer

• It's the end of programming as we know it -- again
• Developers feel secure in their jobs, but they're still thinking about quitting
• The future of the web will need a different sort of software developer
• The best Linux laptops for consumers and developers

A number of African nations have established innovation hubs in an effort to attract coders and tech talent to the region, and draw investment from overseas.

SEE: Generative AI, autonomic systems, hyperautomation and more top Gartner list of top tech trends in 2022

This includes Kenya's$1 billion tech ecosystem -dubbed 'Silicon Savannah' -which continues to attract entrepreneurs, investors and technologists from Africa and further afield.

"In the next three years, there will be nearly 900,000 professional developers across Africa enabled by the rise of informal education channels," said Gartner. "As this market continues to grow, global investors will reduce their venture investment in China in favour of this emerging market."

The analyst's forecast was part of a series of strategic predictions put forward at Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 Americas.

Daryl Plummer, research vice president at Gartner, said the disruption caused by the pandemic and ongoing uncertainty meant organizations and wider industries should be "prepared to move in multiple strategic directions at once," particularly when it came to innovation and digitization, as well as fundamental changes to the workforce.

As such, Gartner predicts a shift to more autonomous styles of working over the next three years as organizations adopt remote and hybrid-working models.

In particular, the analyst said just under a third (30%) of corporate teams will operate without a boss by 2024 as company structure moves away from having decision-making made at the centre and towards "peer-to-peer network-based decision making that reduces bottlenecks and saves time in a hybrid-working environment."

SEE: The future of the office will surprise you. And if it doesn't, something has gone wrong

Removing the traditional manager role could be a logical route to improving efficiency, said Plummer. "The role of the manager as the commander-and-controller of work is a major impediment in an era where business agility requires team empowerment and autonomy," he added.

"Planning, prioritising and organising work efforts still must happen, but it is essential to decouple 'management' from the traditional 'manager' role to reap the benefits of business agility and hybrid work."

Gartner analyst, John Kostoulas, stressed that while the traditional manager role might fade away, it was not "primarily a reduction in force exercise."

Kostoulas toldZDNet: "Managers possess valuable skills that can maximize the performance of teams in other roles than the boss; they can transition into coaching, talent acquisition or capability development roles. Career paths are required to transition managers into individual