Analysis · 28 September 2026 · 6 min read
GitHub publishes, every quarter, how many developer accounts sit in each economy and how much public code they push. We read Lebanon’s line against the rest of the world. The growth is real, it is smaller than the raw numbers suggest, and the dataset cannot see the Lebanese who build from abroad.
Club Cedro’s own pieces so far have been built from individual cases: a founder, a round, a list. This one is built from a dataset that counts instead. The GitHub Innovation Graph is published by GitHub’s policy team under an open licence and reports, economy by economy and quarter by quarter since January 2020, the developer accounts located in each place and the number of times those developers pushed code to GitHub. Its latest release, added to the repository on 7 July 2026, runs to the end of March 2026. We downloaded the files on 28 September 2026 and did the arithmetic ourselves. Every figure below can be reproduced from them.
At the end of March 2020, the dataset placed 30,963 developer accounts in Lebanon. At the end of March 2026 it placed 165,282, a little over five times as many. Code pushes from Lebanon went from 24,565 in the first quarter of 2020 to 221,917 in the first quarter of 2026, about nine times as many.
Those figures would make an easy headline, and on their own they mean little, because GitHub grew enormously over the same period. GitHub’s Octoverse 2025 report says more than 36 million developers joined the platform between September 2024 and August 2025, and that the launch of Copilot Free in December 2024 accelerated sign-ups and repository creation globally.
The fairer test is share. We added up every economy the dataset reports, leaving out its European Union aggregate so that nothing is counted twice, and measured Lebanon against that total.
In March 2020, Lebanon held 6.8 of every 10,000 developer accounts in the dataset. In March 2026 it held 8.6. That is a small rise, and a steady one. Code pushes tell the same story more strongly: measured by calendar year, Lebanon’s share of the pushes rose in every year from 2020 to 2025.
| Year | Pushes from Lebanon | Share per 10,000 | Standing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 154,533 | 4.2 | Our calculation |
| 2021 | 232,091 | 5.6 | Our calculation |
| 2022 | 295,859 | 5.9 | Our calculation |
| 2023 | 359,709 | 6.2 | Our calculation |
| 2024 | 412,505 | 6.5 | Our calculation |
| 2025 | 640,454 | 7.5 | Our calculation |
Whatever else happened in the country over those six years, this line only went one way.
The most recent quarter needs more care. In the first quarter of 2026, pushes from Lebanon were 79.5 percent higher than a year earlier. Across all reported economies the rise was 80.0 percent. The latest surge is the platform’s surge, and Lebanon moved with it rather than ahead of it. Its share that quarter slipped to 6.9 per 10,000, below its 2025 average. One quarter is not a trend, but it is a reason not to read the raw growth as a Lebanese story.
The Copilot effect GitHub describes is visible in Lebanon too. The net number of accounts added in Lebanon was 3,793 in the last quarter of 2024, 8,138 in the first quarter of 2025, and more than 12,000 in each of the two most recent quarters.
Share favours large countries, so the next test is density. For per capita rankings prepared for the Global Digital Collaboration Conference in Geneva this September, GitHub divided pushes by the World Bank’s working-age population, ages 15 to 64. We used the same denominator, the World Bank’s 2025 estimates, and the last four quarters in the data, April 2025 to March 2026.
| Economy | Pushes per 1,000 | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| Estonia | 1,243 | Our calculation |
| Portugal | 726 | Our calculation |
| Cyprus | 691 | Our calculation |
| Georgia | 552 | Our calculation |
| Armenia | 386 | Our calculation |
| Greece | 344 | Our calculation |
| United Arab Emirates | 292 | Our calculation |
| Tunisia | 235 | Our calculation |
| Lebanon | 197 | Our calculation |
| Morocco | 148 | Our calculation |
| Egypt | 116 | Our calculation |
| Jordan | 110 | Our calculation |
Lebanon sits in the middle of this group. It is ahead of Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, and a long way behind Cyprus, Georgia and Armenia, all of which have smaller working-age populations. Cyprus pushes about three and a half times as much public code per working-age resident. Our figures use the location method of the main dataset; GitHub’s conference table also reweighted pushes by the location people give on their profiles, so the two are not directly comparable.
The dataset also counts how many developers in each economy pushed to repositories in each language. Octoverse ranks TypeScript and Python first and second for contributor growth on GitHub in its 2025 year, and describes Python as the lingua franca of AI and machine learning. Developers in Lebanon are moving towards both a little faster than the platform as a whole.
| Language | Lebanon | Lebanon change | All reported economies, change | Standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 1,144 to 2,414 | up 111 percent | up 67 percent | Our calculation |
| TypeScript | 1,003 to 2,371 | up 136 percent | up 103 percent | Our calculation |
We are not saying Lebanon has 165,282 developers. We are not ranking talent, which this data does not measure. And we are not claiming an AI boom: the recent growth matches the platform’s, and the language shift, while real, is a matter of a few thousand accounts.
What we are saying is narrower. There is now a public, reproducible baseline for software activity in Lebanon, and on it the country’s share rose every year from 2020 to 2025 while its density remains well below its smaller neighbours. Claims about Lebanese technical talent can be measured against that line rather than repeated. We will re-run these figures with each quarterly release.
Method. World totals are the sum of every economy reported in each file, excluding the EU aggregate. GitHub does not report a figure for an economy with fewer than 100 developers performing that activity in the quarter, so those are not in the totals. Shares by year divide Lebanon’s pushes for the calendar year by the sum across reported economies for the same year. Per capita figures divide the sum of pushes from April 2025 to March 2026 by the World Bank’s 2025 estimate of the population aged 15 to 64. The data files were downloaded on 28 September 2026 from the release covering the first quarter of 2026.
Sources
Written for Club Cedro. If something here is wrong, say so and it gets corrected with the correction left visible.
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