Tips & Guidelines
This is a simple guide for getting started working with African developers. It's for both parties actually, both the job provider and the techie/designer/blogger in Africa. (If you have any ideas, best practices from your own experience or thoughts on what to add, do let me know.)
Getting Started
1. Agreeing on the scope of the project and the amount to be paid
This is tricky anywhere, but especially here you have the additional complications of long-distance, time zones and cultural issues. It's important to be very clear on the scope, payment schedule, and overall project communications within the job overview itself. Possible problem - do clients expect it to be very cheap and how do African techies decide what rate to charge for European or American work?
2. Briefing - as a job provider, make a briefing or project plan that is clear and understandable
Providing the neccessary files - texts / images / in a useable file format for the person hired to get to work and with clear indications as to what information / image belongs where is absolutely essential. If you cannot provide this in the job overview here, it should be provided via email to job applicants as soon as possible.
3. Project Management - agreeing a clear route of development, steps and planning
In the case of part-time, freelance or gig work, the client often keeps asking for changes and the job doer hasn't agreed beforehand how many rounds of revisions are included, and what the difference is between large and small changes. Generally speaking, it's normal to limit that to 2 / 3 rounds of revisions.
4. Payment
Many times this can be the greatest hurdle. PayPal accounts do not pay directly into any African country, so unless the techie has a US/European bank account to pull the funds from, it won't work. Other options are Moneybookers, Alertpay or Western Union. Just getting the money form bank system to bank system - from Europe you need IBAN codes of the other bank, it's address and the physical address of the bank account holder (no spelling mistakes) and then most electronic banking systems will handle it. Keep in mind, not all African techies have a bank account or one that is linked to international bank system.
Other Resources
As mentioned elsewhere, the WhiteAfrican Job Board is more of an intermediary service for job seekers and job providers to find each other. There are bigger services with broader scope than this curated list. There are too many local providers for me to list here, but below are some international services that might be useful:
Finally
A special thanks to Emer, from Butterfly Works, for sending in some great guidelines and tips. They do a lot of this type of work and know first-hand the hurdles and opportunities.