In the centre of Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital and a megacity of more than 20 million people, is an area has earned the nickname “Yabacon Valley”.
Yaba is the technology epicentre of Africa’s most populous country. Rising tall inside it is an outwardly drab building that is home to Nigeria’s best known start-up incubator.
The Co-Creation Hub began in 2010 with a simple question, posed by Damilola Teidi (31), director of its incubation unit: "How can we leverage technology to solve problems in our communities?"
Teidi says that at the beginning, the project was about “bringing people together to co-create solutions for various stakeholders, developers, entrepreneurs. People with ideas”. Now, she describes Lagos as a “land of promise for start-ups”.
On the sixth floor, the first I visit, about 30 people are sitting in an open plan room. This is one of the three floors, plus a rooftop, occupied by the Co-Creation Hub. Most are silently hunched over laptops. There are glass-walled meeting rooms, beanbags and a leather sofa facing a big TV that plays Nigerian music videos on silent.
The walls are lime green and yellow, and a poster reads: "We invest in next generation infrastructure to transform Nigeria positively." The pandemic means they have fewer people in the office, Teidi says, while programmes that involved international travel have been cancelled or are being held virtually now.
The founders of the Co-Creation Hub, entrepreneurs Bosun Tijani and Femi Longe, chose Yaba because it is not too far from the airport, and close to a lot of schools and universities, such as the University of Lagos, Yaba College of Technology and the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research.
There are about 200 similar technology hubs across Nigeria, including co-working spaces, but the Co-Creation Hub also acts as an innovation centre. Initially, it ran a pre-incubation programme, giving start-ups as little as $5,000 to see if they could turn ideas into products. It provided space for teams to work out of, and offered educational opportunities and access to further funding.
Hackathons
Over the past 12 years, the hub has supported more than 650 organisations, while it now also operates in Rwanda, Kenya and Nigeria. It runs innovation challenges, has held hackathons – events that bring computer programmers together – and set up programmes with partners across the world.
They were involved in the creation of a printed guide to start-ups in the city (it includes advice on starting a company and paying taxes, as well as a section on “cultural differences”, which warns “there’s ... a culture of lateness, so don’t expect meetings to be punctual”).
The hub has hosted some impressive names. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg visited in 2016 during his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive of Twitter, came in 2019.
But the hub’s first challenge was ensuring access to the internet, Teidi recalls. “Years ago, when we kicked off here, of course, the internet wasn’t as good as you have it today,” she says during a tour of the premises. The hub worked with the Lagos state government and other partners to lay fibre optic cabling. This attracted a lot of other start-ups to the area.
Getting a stable power supply has been another problem. “[In] some areas in Nigeria you don’t find light for a few days,” Teidi says. When the electricity goes off they turn on a diesel generator, but that is expensive to run.
On the wall of Teidi's office is a poster that reads: "I follow simple steps for my startup. 1. Start it up. 2. Make money. 3. Make money to cover expenses. 4. Make money for yourself." She says there are now several so-called "unicorns" – meaning a privately held technology-based start-up company with a valuation of over $1 billion – in Nigeria. Some of the original start-ups that have done well are now investing in others.
As it achieves increasing success, the technology industry has also ended up in the heart of Nigerian politics. The government and security forces’ failure to recognise its promise ended up sparking some of the most large-scale protests the country has known, and even led to a brutal massacre.
‘Yahoo boys’
In Ireland, people are well acquainted with the idea of Nigerian "princes", or fraudsters, who send emails encouraging unsuspecting victims to divulge their bank account details, or even to wire across money. In Nigeria, these scammers are known as "Yahoo boys", and they've given the legitimate technology industry a bad name.
In 2019, a campaign called #StopRobbingUs was launched by Nigerian tech workers who said they were being constantly harassed and extorted by members of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars), a branch of the Nigerian police, who identified them as having money and accused them of being scammers.
In October the following year, End Sars protests spread nationwide, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets. They were co-ordinated through social media, including on Twitter, where an analysis found 48 million tweets on the topic were posted in just ten days.
While authorities eventually promised to disband the police unit, the protests continued until October 20th, 2020, ending only when security forces shot demonstrators dead at multiple locations, including at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos, 17km from Yabba, where protesters were singing the national anthem and waving Nigeria’s flag when the assault began.
Less than two months ago, a judicial panel of inquiry finally issued a report saying there had been at least 48 casualties, including 11 peaceful protesters shot dead by the police and army, who then cleaned up the scene, removing evidence. At least four people are still missing.
Among Nigerian tech workers there is still a lot of shock and anger over what happened, as well as clear frustration that their government does not appreciate the opportunities this booming industry can offer its population.
Security forces
In 2018, Nigeria was declared '"poverty capital of the world'" by the US think tank, the Brookings Institution, after the number of citizens living in extreme poverty there overtook the number in India, despite India having a population almost seven times greater. The number of unemployed people in Nigeria is greater than that of all EU member states combined.
Teidi says there is “ignorance and also reluctance to learn” from the country’s leadership, which leads to “counter-intuitive policies”. It’s hard for the government to fathom that “someone can grow a billion-dollar business” legally without being tied to an office or specific workplace, she says.
“A lot of things are moving fast and there’s a government that isn’t trying to think innovatively... I think the government can support [us] a lot better, [but] there [is] dialogue that is taking place between [the] private and public sector.”
Today, the threat from Nigeria's security forces remains. People still post regularly on Twitter saying they have been "kidnapped" and extorted by police or people wearing police uniforms. There is also increased regulation. Since June 2021, Twitter has been blocked nationwide, after the social media giant deleted a tweet about the Biafran war by Nigerian president Muhammad Buhari.
Last year, banks were also instructed to shut down the accounts of certain individuals trading in cryptocurrency.
Despite all of this, Teidi says Nigeria is a good place to invest in start-ups, partially because of “the resilience, the grit” that Nigerians have. “[It is good if] you’re willing to understand the ecosystem and take time to understand which sectors should [you] be investing in; what exactly does the policy landscape look like?”
International investors, she says, can get cold feet when they look at Nigeria on a macro economic level: the exchange rate, the volatility of the currency and some of the government policies. “But there’s no way without risk, right? There’s no business without risk.”
