Two Jacks have visited Nigeria under 1 week. The curious part isn’t the names but what they represent. One is Jack Dorsey, the billionaire founder of Twitter; the second is Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of the second largest e-commerce portal in the world, Alibaba. While the latter is billed for the Nigerian Economic Summit; the former was on an intimacy visit.
However, their visit to Nigeria in the same week is no coincidence. The tech ecosystem in Nigeria is growing stronger. The growth of Jumia, the exploit of Andela in Nigeria, combined with the spread of tech innovation hubs in the country are a pointer to the maturing tech ecosystem in one of Africa’s largest economy. Within that thriving ecosystem several Fintechs have cropped up too, ride hailing systems have also plugged in, besides niche e-commerce platforms deploying the tools available across the social networks to reach millions of Nigerian consumers.
The consumer base is massive. An estimated 200million population, with around 68% gaining access to telephony and internet service, is great a market, and an attraction to investors.
The tech scenarios are creating a whole new narrative among the startup community.
According to a venture finance research carried out in Nigeria, by VC4A, an enterprise building platform, ” More specifically, 76% of the Nigerian ventures are creating jobs with an average of 8.5 FTE per venture. When taking a further look at the jobs created per age group, 56% of the employees hired are between 12 and 35 years. This is a considerable contribution to the country given its growing population and justifies further investment in the growth and development of the startup ecosystem and the entrepreneurs it supports”.
More, Lagos presently rivals Nairobi, Johannesburg and Cairo as one of the top investors’ destinations when sourcing for where to push private equity and venture capital funds, going by a research conducted by Green TechCapital recently.
It is therefore no mistakes that the global tech chiefs, with a combined personal networth of approximately $48 billion are visiting Nigeria. Elon Musk may even be visiting very soon.
