At the London Tech Week this year, attendees were dressed in smart-casual clothes, hundreds of them moving from booth to booth in the exhibition area and hundreds more settled in at panels, showcases, and fireside chats going on on six different stages spread throughout the large dome of the Olympia Events centre in London, UK. Delegations from different countries had booths in the exhibition area—Japan, Switzerland, Nepal, Palestine, Pakistan, and many others. The area held 268 booths of various businesses, but only one of these booths belonged to an African country. The South African Pavilion came to the conference with a packet of 11 startups huddled in its booth. Although many African founders and operators in tech could be seen moving with the crowd, the London Tech Week’s agenda did not have a strong focus on the continent; there was just one event focused on discussing African innovation—“Africa: The Next Frontier for the Global Emerging Tech Sector”.

One would think innovation in the continent is far from exciting. And they would be wrong. 

The aforementioned panel was moderated by Justina Oha, partnership consultant at Big Cabal Media; with participation from Yewande Odumosu, managing partner, HoaQ Ventures Fund, an angel investment fund; Tomi Davies, CEO of TVC Labs, a VC providing strategic and operational support to early-stage African tech-enabled ventures; and Deepankar Rustagi, founder and CEO of OmniRetail, a unified consumer goods distribution startup.

The panel discussed the reasons behind unrelenting innovation in Africa, despite the current harsh business climate.

Rustagi, whose OmniRetail was listed by the Financial Times as a fastest-growing company for 2024, said that building for the African market presents opportunities to build for global markets. “In the process of solving one problem, there are various different problems you’ll have to build. When an American startup is building solutions, they follow the trend of a sequoia tree—one single laser focus on the problem—but when a  Nigerian is solving a problem, he has to follow the trend of a banyan tree; if you want to solve the problem in Africa, you have to actually build various different startups. And if you, in those scenarios, can build a solution, that’s a very robust, scalable solution that can work anywhere in the world.”

Odumosu believes that innovation continues to happen in Africa because there is an ongoing interaction, through cross-border payments, talent export, and business expansions of startups, between Africans living locally and those living elsewhere in the world. “In the past, you hardly saw a Nigerian company expanding into India or China,” she said. “Now you have LemFi doing that. Also, with a lot of migration happening, we’re also exporting talent. A lot of Africans are now building hubs and businesses locally and in their home countries.”

With generative artificial intelligence (AI) expected to add $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually, according to this McKinsey report, there was an impossible-to-miss enthusiasm about the subject at the London Tech Week; there were 25 panels and fireside chats dedicated to discussing various aspects of the emergence of and innovation around AI.

A presentation delivered before the panel by Olanrewaju Odunowo, head at TechCabal Insights, a data and insights company, revealed a list of African startups across 11 countries deploying AI to solve various problems.

Davies admitted that AI is taking off “aggressively” on the continent and believes that the continent is ready to exploit the technology to solve problems. “AI is being used in diagnostics and telemedicine,” he said. “If you look at agriculture, we’re starting to see AI used in crop maintenance and weather prediction. Now we’re starting to see [electrical] power aggregators who have the capability to use AI to distribute within regions and within locales.”

Davies addressed the current funding downturn—“It’s a blip.” He said that future economic growth will come from Africa, given its teeming youth population. “We’re now waking up and starting to properly educate Africans so that they have the capability to deploy and develop technology,” he said.

In 2023, we began publishing impact reports to publicly track our coverage of the ecosystem and better understand how it is changing. As we roll out 2024’s first report, our objective remains the same: to furnish stakeholders—operators, innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers—with insights that empower them to make informed decisions and effectively contribute to the continent’s technological and socio-economic development. For this edition of the report, we will fuss less about reader numbers, and instead share with you the ways we are rejigging the news for your pleasure.

As always, this report and the milestones it describes represent TechCabal’s pledge to uphold the highest journalistic standards and to continuously evolve for the betterment of our publication and the community we serve.

The start of the year is often slow, with businesses still planning their year, monitoring the economy closely, and reviewing their budgets. But, in the TechCabal newsroom, we got straight to business in January; the news waits for no one. We knew that this year would be critical for many startups in our space, and we had a responsibility to deliver accurate and balanced narratives as tech businesses navigated the tough year ahead; the world outside Africa was watching. 

In line with our parent company Big Cabal Media’s resolve this year to chase excellence, TechCabal is chasing the stories of excellence, grit and success at African startups. We insist that it’s not all gloomy news in the ecosystem. We are eager, desperate even, to champion the optimistic shifts coming out of the ecosystem, and there has been a lot of it lately.

This past quarter, more than 120 startups in Africa raised a combined $466 million. It is a 45.62% reduction when compared to Q1 2023, but it is hopeful. Equity made up 71% of financing while debt made up 28%. In January, Swvl posted a net profit of $2.1 million; and the following month, Jumia reduced its operating losses in Q4 2023 to $4.5 million, its lowest in four years and a major step towards its profitability drive. South Africa granted licences to 59 crypto companies. Payroll and HR software provider, Payspace, was acquired by American payroll and compliance provider Deel—one of 12 acquisitions that have happened this year.

What else does “chasing excellence” mean to us?

This quarter was about listening to you about our work. We are always open to feedback from you because it means that you care. The lessons from your suggestions have been strong and will continue to serve as a catalyst for introspection and improvement of our editorial processes. 

Chasing stories of excellence in the ecosystem means striving to continually improve our editorial processes and committing firmly to only telling stories that are true, accurate, and balanced. Our credibility is our currency. We are not in a hurry to break a story before we have all the facts; we are not afraid to kill a story if its claims are suspect or unverifiable.

What then is the scoop?

In January, we launched a breaking-news newsletter, TC Scoop, to bring you the latest news as soon as it drops. If you are signed up to TC Scoop, it means you receive our biggest stories of the day before anybody else! This is all part of our agenda to curate a strong community of well informed readers. Over 7,000 of you have subscribed to TC Scoop. If you are not plugged in yet, click here to sign up! 

A key objective for us at TC is leveraging the news to connect with the businesses whose stories we tell. As a publication, we grew up with Africa’s tech ecosystem, beginning our story at about the same time many of the successful startups of today either started theirs or were nascent and ignored by Silicon Valley media. 

We are still committed to using our voice to amplify startups. And so, we have revamped the series, Who Calls The Shots?, to spotlight leadership-level tech professionals and the businesses they are building. Who are the names behind your most promising businesses—Bamboo, Sycamore, Get Equity and at Herconomy? How are their companies shaping the future of innovation on the continent?

We have also expanded our storytelling formats to include a long-reads column on the weekend, The Algorithm; and video news.

Every Saturday, The Algorithm will bring you in-depth analysis and perspective on a wide range of topics, from freelance writers’ earnings under an AI regime to stories of vendors grappling with the high cost of shipping deliveries to customers. On The Algorithm we are taking you to the backend of content creation, its many aspects, its many creators, and the many ways that they work and thrive. How are food creators defining their audience’s palates, you may have wondered? What does success look like for lifestyle creators, you ask? We will answer it all, unfurling the bits and details, one creator at a time. 

When we launched the video news format, we were thinking of convenience. Whether you are in  traffic, doing chores or playing sports, you can receive the news without interrupting your daily life. We publish one video story a day. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date with video news. 

Celebrating businesses by women

If you missed our International Women’s Day video podcast with Yanmo Omoregbe (COO, Bamboo), Ifeoma Nwobu (COO, Sendstack) and Omowumi Omidiji (CEO at SHOP F.A.W.L.), click here to watch it. It was an insightful conversation that tackled the current temperature in Africa’s startup environment. With humour and admirable honesty, Omoregbe, Nwobu, and Omidiji discussed funding outlook this year, the challenges they face in building products for Africa, and what changes AI could bring to their businesses. 

Our East Africa and Southern Africa impact

Kenya and South Africa are two of our biggest readership blocs (besides Nigeria). The tech ecosystems in the East and Southern African regions have been, for many years, vibrant and progressing innovation on the continent. Since last year, we have worked to deepen our storytelling in these regions—Ethiopia’s rising inflation; Kenya’s proposed AI legislation through the  AI and Robotics Bill; Bolt’s expansion into Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Our hard work growing our audience in East Africa is starting to pay off. One year after Kenn Abuya joined us as senior reporter for the region, Adonijah Ndege has joined the team in the same role. Adonijah is bringing to TC 10 years’ experience reporting finance, business and technology in Kenyan media. He joins us from Business Daily, where he was online editor and led the transition of the publication from a print to digital medium. Together, Kenn and Adonijah, will be intensifying our reporting of East Africa.

Our Southern Africa reporter, Ephraim Modise, is currently visiting  Cape Town, from Botswana, on special assignment. Over the next two weeks, he will be meeting with key players in tech, attending select events, and breaking the news from the scene in South Africa. If you are in the area between today and the end of May, please reach out to him: ephraim@bigcabal.com.

Moonshot events

We are preparing hard for the second edition of Moonshot, our flagship conference that brings together players in the tech ecosystem to collaborate and share knowledge. 

Leading up to the conference, we are hosting a series of small pre-conference mixers in select locations across the continent. We already held one in Nairobi, Kenya, in February—“The AI Dance: Balancing innovation and regulation”. A highlight of our mixer in Nairobi was visiting Nairobi Garage, a major aggregator of the tech ecosystem in the country. They boast over 6,000 active members who use their facility as a workspace and for activations. It was a heartwarming experience as these are the stories of creativity that we love to see and shout about.

With these mixers we are creating a welcoming and inclusive environment where attendees can connect, socialise, and lay the groundwork for a productive and enjoyable conference experience come October. We will be hosting another pre-conference mixer at the GITEX Africa Conference in Marrakech, Morocco, in May. If you are in Marrakech for GITEX between May 29 and 31, please look out for us and come say hello!

As for the main event in October, Moonshot, click here to get your early-bird tickets!

As always, thank you

We don’t have a platform without you, dear reader. Your praise, feedback, and engagement fuel our ambition to provide comprehensive coverage of startups and their builders. We will continue to empower entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders to drive positive change and innovation within Africa’s tech landscape. Thank you. 

See you next time!

Africa’s potential in economics, digital penetration, and business has positioned it  for explosive growth, but there are challenges it must overcome first.  These challenges, alongside innovative solutions, will be spotlighted at the 2023 Africa Tech Festival, happening in Cape Town, from November 13–16. 

The festival will feature a strong line-up of headline speakers, including several African government ministers. 

“Businesses across Africa have benefited enormously from leap-frogging traditional technology to the digital world and wireless connectivity, and this is spurring incredible growth across the continent,” says James Williams, director of  events at Informa Tech, organisers of the festival. “The incredible advantages of digitalisation are, however, dependent on a plentiful and reliable source of power, and it’s essential that the public sector has strong strategies in place to drive this growth.”

Among the 200-plus speakers, presenters, and panellists will be Gwede Mantashe, minister of mineral resources and energy and Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, South Africa’s minister for electricity, both of whom will be providing insight on how the South African government is tackling load shedding and the country’s energy crisis.

There will also be a panel on  “Universal power access: Plotting a route through Africa’s electricity challenge”, which will place the future of digital transformation on the shoulders of electricity and citizens’ access to energy. 

In Africa, energy insecurity has been a chronic inhibitor of economic development for decades, and continues to cripple enterprise growth and innovation, and these panels will unpack why a staggering 30 of Africa’s 54 nations face daily power shortages and supply interruptions, all of which cause economic havoc to local businesses and hamper consumer activity. 

Another key area of public-sector engagement with the tech sector will be discussed in the keynote panel “Unleashing digital prosperity: How progressive policy is shaping Africa’s tech transformation”. This session will present African ministers from across the continent with an opportunity to share how they are tailoring policy to their unique national priorities.

“The process of developing and implementing policy across myriad industries and sectors is, however, an inherently complex and lengthy process and relies heavily on industry consultation, sector-specific legislation and flexibility to evolve with rapidly changing sectors,” says Williams, highlighting the importance of the growing number of ministerial delegations at Africa Tech Festival year on year.  

Other African ministers of government that will be in attendance are Ousmane Gaoual Diallo, the Republic of Guinea’s minister of posts, telecommunications and digital economy; Peya Mushelenga, Namibia’s minister of information and communication technology; and Audrin Mathe, executive director and permanent secretary in the ministry of information and communication technology.

Other high-level speakers that will be sharing with the government delegates over the three days of the festival are Dion Jerling, co-founder, Connect Earth; Richard Cazalet, head of strategy, Telkom SA; Robert Aouad, CEO, ISOCEL Telecom; Russell Southwood, CEO, Balancing Act; Vuyani Tati, managing partner, AfriTech Catalytic Growth Fund; Jocelyn Nyaguse, head of marketing and storytelling, Startupbootcamp AfriTech; Calvin Govender, general manager ICT fixed services, MTN; Marjorie Saint-Lot, country manager, Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Uber; Evan Jones, CEO, The Collective X; Nfaly Sylla, ministry of posts, telecommunications and digital economy, Republic of Guinea; Kellie Murungi, chief investments officer, East African Power; John Davies, TMT Analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence; and many others.

The Africa Tech Festival is the meeting place of Africa’s largest community of tech champions and offers this vibrant grouping the ideal space to connect and interact. 

For more information, please visit the festival website,  and to get your tickets, click this link.

TechCabal and its business intelligence unit TC Insights have won awards in three categories at the Startup Awards, held on October 5 and 6 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The awards are for Best New Media Platform (Technology), Best Startup Intelligence Platform (TC Insights), and  Best Startup Ecosystem Newsletter (TC Daily).

This award is coming just as the publication is preparing to host one of the biggest tech conferences on the continent, Moonshot. The conference, which will be held in Lagos on October 11  and 12, will bring together Africa’s tech ecosystem in person to network, collaborate, share insights and celebrate innovation on the continent.

The Startup Awards, organised by #StartupSouth, a startup ecosystem development and advocacy organisation, honours individuals and organisations that have made a verifiable impact in deepening the innovation ecosystem in Nigeria, with specific reference to the South-South/South-Eastern regions.

In his welcome address, Owen Shedrack, senior associate at #StartupSouth and programme lead for the Startup Awards, emphasised the importance of collective efforts in achieving economic prosperity and development.  “Whether directly or indirectly, we have seen the impact in our work at #StartupSouth. The award is a way to show gratitude, inspire, and motivate them to continue the good work.”

A breakdown of the winners’ list shows that TechCabal, winning in three categories, was the biggest winner of the night.

The 2023 edition of the Startup Awards witnessed significant growth, with over 300 nominations received and an impressive 4,000 votes recorded. The evaluation criteria included public vote (20%), national spread/national impact/relevance (20%), venture backing for startups (20%), regional impact (20%), and jury decision (20%).

In his speech before handing over the awards to the winners, Yakubu Musa, acting national coordinator, Office for Nigerian Digital Innovation (ONDI). National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), commended the organisers of the awards and pledged NITDA’s support and willingness to work with the team in subsequent editions. 

In his closing remarks, Uche Aniche, convener of #StartupSouth, thanked all the nominees and the winners for their relentless commitment to the #StartupSouth ethos. He emphasised that everyone who made it to the nomination table deserved to win the award and urged them to see the awards as an invitation to do more.  

Notable guests at the event were Nkechi Obi, CEO of Sports Nigeria Ltd/GTE and chairman of the Nigeria Women Football League, NWFL; Kehinde Ogundare (country manager Nigeria at Zoho; Olufemi Abioye, founder/CEO of Dekaizen; Tessy Ewuzie, facility manager at Aradel Holdings; and Ikechukwu Anachemba, senior special assistant to the governor of Anambra State on innovation & incubation.

Full list of winners

1. Startup of the Year – National – HouseAfrica
2. Startup of the Year – Regional – Foris Labs 
3. Inspirational Founder of the Year – National – Nnamdi Uba & Ndifreke Ikokpu
4. Inspirational Founder of the Year – Regional – Aaron Esumeh
5. Public Institution of the Year – National – NITDA
6. Public Institution of the Year – Regional – Skill-up Imo (MInistry Digital Economy & e-Government)
7. Best Startup Coverage (Radio) – Regional – Nigeria Info PH
8. Best Startup Coverage (TV) – National – Channels TV
9. Best Startup Coverage (TV) – Regional – AfiaTV Enugu
10. Best Startup Coverage (Non-Technology) New Media – National – Nairametrics 
11. Best Startup Coverage (Non-Technology) New Media – Regional – Naira Diary
12. Startup Journalist of the Year Regional – Peter Oluka (Tech Economy)
13. Most Inspirational Technology Hub – Regional – OlotuSquare, Port Harcourt
14. Best Startup/Technology Show (TV) – The Beam (Channels TV)
15. Best Startup Coverage (Print) – BusinessDay
16. Best Startup Ecosystem Newsletter – TechCabal Daily
17. Best Startup Ecosystem Podcast or Vlog – Growing Africa Podcast (Daniel Ose)
18. Most Inspiring Startup Community – Onitsha Business Connect 
19. Most Active #StartupSouth City Community – Port Harcourt
20. Next Rated Startup – Bellum (Port Harcourt)
21. Best New Media Platform (Technolog) – TechCabal
22. Best Startup/Technology Show (Radio) – The Entrepreneur (WaveFM Port Harcourt)
23. Best Startup Ecosystem Intelligence Platform – TechCabal Insights

Have you got your tickets to TechCabal’s Moonshot Conference? Click here to do so now!

After almost a decade working in the US, including at Goldman Sachs, he returned to Nigeria in 2005, to join the United Bank of Africa as principal manager, enterprise networks. In this role, he standardised and improved the security of the bank’s networks.

Today, Guobadia has moved from being the hands-on engineering guy who worked on the backend of technology infrastructure, to being a policymaker. In August 2020, he was appointed by Nigeria’s outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari, as senior special assistant on digital transformation. In June of the following year, he led the design and drafting of the Nigeria Startup Bill, now passed into law last October. The law is designed to protect the interests of startups and the government in the advancement of technological innovations. 

In this episode of My Life in Tech, Guobadia discusses the thinking behind the Nigerian Startup Act, the state of infrastructure to support innovation, the need for e-governance, and lookaheads for the Nigerian tech ecosystem under the incoming Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency.

Tell me about your leading the clamour for the Nigeria Startup Act. What specific pain points were you operating from?

I’ve been a project manager for a very long time. It’s one thing to be an engineer, it’s another to understand how to execute projects and programmes. I’ve been an entrepreneur in Nigeria for 16 years; I started my company in 2007. So I understand the difficulty involved in developing and executing ideas in Nigeria. Nigeria is VUCA+++ (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). It’s very difficult to do business here. One of the reasons I came into government was because I was inquisitive as to what happens in government that makes doing business in Nigeria difficult. I wanted to learn. 

What the Startup Act does is create an enabling environment for young people to feel confident enough to work on hard problems. Otherwise, our startups will focus on the easy problems, the problems you can easily do a valuation for, for which you can easily see an exit or market. But there are problems for which we can’t easily see a market because you’re creating a new market. And we may not get to those innovations, because they are difficult to do; not because the ideas are not there but because the environment is difficult. What the Startup Act does is create an enabling environment that makes it easy to address these problems.

Can you give me some examples of these problems for which we could be creating a new market?

I know banking the unbanked is an issue, but there are harder problems that digital technology could probably address—healthtech, agritech (I mean, real agritech, not in the Ponzi scheme way). You look at problems like fuel shortage—what’s the solution for that? I heard of a group of girls somewhere that were creating a scheduling app for the delivery of water, like Uber for water. 

Even giving examples is difficult, because it’s just like everything else you hear about new ideas, like the iPhone; this is not how we thought phones should work, but then it was created and we go, oh, we always needed it!

What steps is the government you’re a part of taking to implement the NSB across the federation?

The implementation of the Act lies with the minister of communication and digital economy, specifically with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). The law itself is self-implementing; it basically gives instructions as to what should happen. The minister of communication and digital economy has gone ahead and created an implementation committee that is currently working on different aspects of the act. We’ve started a programme where we are trying to get states to adopt the act.

What’s this state adoption programme like?

The real impact on startups of the NSA happens at the state level. So it’s critical that every state adopts the act. It is up to them how they want to adopt it because states should compete globally with other countries, not against each other. What is key is that states adopt the Act and put together policies and incentives that will attract young people to them. I’m from Edo state, but maybe an idea I have will work best in Zamfara and Sokoto, so I will move to Zamfara and Sokoto because the policies there are best suited for my business. It should be that Nigerians have the mobility to execute their ideas all over the country, not just in Lagos. 

We will definitely be going to every state and running programmes there. The ultimate idea is that when we are done with a state, there will be an ecosystem there. The next startup that impacts the world could start in a Nigerian village because you created the opportunity and environment for young people to develop ideas.

Are you worried that the infrastructural deficit in Nigeria will impact the rate at which states are able to domesticate the NSA and build attractive tech ecosystems in their domains?

No, because you have to start somewhere. If you Google Osun state and the Nigerian Startup Act,  you’ll see what I’m trying to say: the government has waived right-of-way fees for cabling companies. If you start these programmes in every state, then the infrastructure problems will become something that makes sense to solve. Policy shows the posture of government, as in what it wants to do; and regulation shows you what you [should and] shouldn’t do.

Let me take you back to your intention in joining this government. You told me you wanted to learn about governance from the inside. Can you share your key learnings with me, now that your time in government draws to a close?

Collaboration and engagement with the government is one of the key ways to solve our problems. You can’t build anything, really, without the government. The truth of the matter is that, even some of the fintech stuff we have going now was because of certain policies that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) had built that now led to us being able to find opportunities with fintech. If certain policies went the other way, we wouldn’t have a fintech market. You need government and you must continue to partner with and engage government in order to have a healthy ecosystem.

The other key learning for me is that politicians do listen. I think it’s a case of, what are we saying to politicians? Political will is driven by citizens’ sentiments. If we all agree that we want to do XYZ, and we all believe it together, it’s quite likely that the politician that we end up with will now take that as a political will. When we are not collaborating on a set of sentiments, then the political will has nothing to build on. It’s about understanding that all of us are Nigerians; people who enter government service or become politicians are not from Mars. We must continue to engage them to get the desired results. 

The Nigeria Startup Act would not have happened without collaboration and engagement, [it] would not have survived and become what it is without continued and sustained citizen participation in the process. The Act is designed to have strong citizen participation through what we call the consultative forum, which will be a body of citizens from the sector. Before I came to government, if you’d asked me who the ecosystem is, I would have said it was me.  But the ecosystem is made up of government, policymakers and founders; and if we are not engaged with each other, we will not have a healthy ecosystem. 

Let’s linger a bit on your point about political will being driven by citizens’ sentiments. I’m thinking of the Nigerian government’s ban on crypto, under Buhari, in 2021, despite the country being one of the fastest crypto-adopting economies in the world. Why wasn’t the government listening to the people regarding this innovation then? How would you address that issue now, at this moment?

When you are building a startup, you’re disrupting how things work. Let’s say, it takes 100 people to change a lightbulb, and I build a solution that makes it possible for just one person to change that lightbulb, that is disruption, right? What the policymaker sees is not disruption, but displacement; there are now 99 people who don’t have a job. Policymakers are meant to protect what exists. Without collaboration and engagement, there is no way for the policymaker to understand that, although that disruption has enabled just one person to change the lightbulb, it should now be in their business plan to make 99 other light bulbs, because they know that the inefficiency is that the room [where the one lightbulb is] is too dark. So now we have 100 lightbulbs, and each person gets their own lightbulb to change.  But if innovators and the government are doing things separately and the policymaker is ignorant of what the innovator is doing, he will ban the innovation. In Nigeria, everybody is creative and entrepreneurial; it’s one of our greatest traits. But while you’re going entrepreneurial, you must consider the impact towards what exists because our economy is not that deep. Small things that happen with finances affect bigger things.

What can you tell me about the government’s recent approval of a national blockchain policy?

Policy and regulation is that the audit should be done in a collaborative manner. I’d like to believe that the people in the blockchain ecosystem are involved in conversations with the policy’s development. What the policy statement says is what the government intends to do with certain technology. However, I come from the school of thought that, even with new technology, we have to get our infrastructure right first. What tends to happen in economies like ours is, we believe we must leapfrog. Machine learning, AI; these are all new technologies that need to sit on existing infrastructure.

The new government should focus on ensuring that we have the right infrastructure in place; that we have access to connectivity in government, the private sector and rural areas; that we have e-governance in place; and that citizens can access the government over the internet. We have to move away from paper and do governance on digital platforms. Right now, governance is still heavily reliant on paper. How do we talk about blockchain and AI when even the policy on it is moved around on paper?

Look at it as a three-stack approach: infrastructure, digitisation, and virtualisation. Infrastructure covers things like cabling, data centres, networks, and wireless connectivity. Digitisation is when you convert [analogue] processes into digital form; then I can pay my taxes online, access my bank accounts with one unique number, and apply for a licence without having to go see anybody in an office.

Virtualisation—not to be confused with server virtualisation—is a higher stack where all these other things fall into place. How do you use all the data—AI and machine learning—that you have moved from manual to digital? That’s what machine learning is. But how is AI going to get information that is stored on paper, in a  warehouse, for the last 50 years? So, when you say AI in Nigeria, what exactly are you training the machine to do? How is AI going to get information that is not digitised? 

Does that mean our current infrastructure deficit worries you, then?

I don’t say this to burst the bubble of new technology. What I’m saying is from a programme manager and engineering perspective. Blockchain technology is resource-intensive: where is that resource going to come from, when you haven’t built enough data centres that the cost of hosting data drops? 

Also, the market for some of our startups is truncated. The market is huge, but the addressable market is truncated because of our paper problem. You cannot sell fintech to somebody that wants to go into a bank branch, because they want “to sign”. You also want to think about the education of the citizens, so that they understand they are going digital.

Look at every other country that has moved into the digital space successfully—Estonia, Dubai—they built the infrastructure to support new technologies. Otherwise, what you’ll have is taking the data and putting it on somebody else’s server, which is the problem we’ve had with every other resource in Africa. We take our oil, we don’t refine it, we take it out. If you take your data and put it on somebody else’s server, is that not refining? Why would we want to repeat that mistake?

My Life in Tech (MLIT) is a biweekly column that profiles innovators, leaders, and shapers in the African tech ecosystem, with the intention of putting a human face to the startups and innovations they build. A new episode drops every other Wednesday at 3 PM (WAT). If you think your story will interest MLIT readers, please fill out this form.

This interview has been edited for length.

Why did you leave microbiology?

There weren’t many research institutes in Nigeria when I worked in the field. I didn’t want to end up in some lab just mixing reagents and doing basic malaria tests. I studied it because I really love it; I still do. But I couldn’t practise it in that kind of way. Maybe if I’d gotten some research opportunities, I would have stayed on. 

I’m familiar with risk assessment for credit and insurance services, but not for product development. Can you help me out here?

Because Sparkle is a digital bank, things that a traditional bank would consider to be a service—receiving funds, making transfers, etc—we look at them, holistically, as products. My role as a risk manager in product development starts with conceptualisation of what the product should be. As a risk manager, I like to ensure that we’re asking the right sort of questions. What does this product do for the customer? How does it add value to them? How do we deliver that value? These are some of the practical ways that could help you in delivering your products, if you have risk management involvement. My job even goes as far as product launching: after you’ve launched the product, you come back to review and ask the right questions. How do you determine when to tweak the product because it’s not really meeting the purpose for which it was designed? And so on.

How did you get into risk management? 

I’m a curious person. Once something doesn’t add up, you can trust that I’d want to look into it to find out what I don’t know. I started my career in Guaranty Trust Bank. I was in sales; and many times, when my customers wanted to purchase treasury bills or bonds, those conversations were a bit difficult for me to have because while at training school, treasury was not my forte. I lived in Northern Nigeria at the time. I had a conversation with my divisional director at the time about doing something I felt would challenge me. The bank was just setting up its enterprise risk team. In enterprise risk, you’re not only doing credit risk, you’re doing operational risk, market risk, all the risk areas. I thought this might be a good time to join that team. I took a gamble on it. The more I got into it, the more I loved it. I started out with interest rate risk management, within the financial market risk team. I’d later get redeployed from market risk to credit risk. I didn’t like it at the time, because, you know, I’d been practising in financial risk management for about four years and was actually considering a career in just financial risk management. But a mentor told me my redeployment would broaden my horizon. He encouraged me to give it a try, and that’s what I did. I ended up loving it because credit is the engine room of banking.

After a while, in line with the conversation my mentor had with me, I wanted to be a holistic risk manager. It wasn’t something that was common at the time; a lot of my peers and senior colleagues were experts in one area but didn’t know so much about another area; even organisations were looking for risk managers who were experts in one area or another, not so much open enterprise. And I thought to myself that because I wanted to have a holistic view, I should take a gamble. And so I requested to move to operational risk, where I also got the opportunity to do things like environmental and social risk management or sustainability and business continuity. And that’s kind of how I got to experience various areas of risk management.

Was the sustainability risk aspect anything to do with climate change? 

Exactly, yes. It was something that my manager sort of threw at me, and I took it up because I was curious. At the time, the Central Bank of Nigeria had just started to drive the conversations around sustainability, and it was a great opportunity to delve into it.

Why did you decide to move from traditional to digital banking at a time when traditional banks are increasingly  shipping digital-heavy services? 

Part of risk management is waking up and smelling the coffee. What I’m referring to is change. Like you said, even the traditional banks are going digital. Risk management is about  recognising change. Another reason, for me, was my sense of purpose and vision. All the organisations I’ve worked with, I believed in their vision. When I worked with Guaranty Trust Bank it wasn’t just about making revenue from customers; it was about offering transparent services that helped customers build their businesses, from small and medium businesses (SMEs) to multimillion naira businesses. When I worked with AXA, it was about helping people live better lives. Here at Sparkle, the mission is financial inclusion. I am definitely connected with that vision and that’s why I decided to move to Sparkle. 

As someone from a traditional background, banking and insurance, what do you think fintech can learn from the more established legacy institutions? 

I’d say issues around governance: definitely risk management, compliance with risk,  information security risk, and data privacy. I think traditional environments are more conscious around governance topics whereas in the fintech space, you want to be nimble. But you also want to build to last.  I mean, look at what’s happening in the crypto market today. I’m pretty sure there are some people saying, “I told you so!” because there’s nothing new under the sun. Life is a cycle; if you apply certain principles, you get certain results. There are a lot of gains to be made from having the right level of governance, the right level of risk management, and even the right level of compliance in the digital space.

Speaking of crypto, Sparkle doesn’t facilitate crypto transactions. Why? 

We are a licensed bank in Nigeria; that means we have to comply with the regulations and laws of the country. It goes back to finding that right balance, in terms of governance.

Let’s talk about your time in insurance. Why did you go into insurance, all the way from banking?

I was driven by a desire to gain more technical competency in risk management. I had been approached by a recruiter and asked if I was interested in the opportunity to work with AXA. AXA had just bought a majority stake in Mansard.

Risk management in insurance is, in my humble opinion, more technical. In the context of the Nigerian environment, you are dealing with a lot more. If I pick the average banking product, for example, loans, and I wanted to give you a loan and I have certain information about you, there is a certain constant that I can put on top of those variables to have a certain level of confidence to know that I’m pricing correctly to improve the chances of the client repaying the loan. In banking, both as a relationship manager and also as a credit manager, there were various controls that we could put in place to ensure that if funds were disbursed to a client, they would utilise those funds for the stated purpose and, therefore, the purpose of the credit would be achieved. 

In insurance, you’re dealing with so many other variables. If I sold car insurance to a client, for example, it’s difficult to price the client adequately as low-risk because there’s the state of Nigerian roads, traffic, and road-raged drivers who could bump into their car. 

And in the context of the Nigerian market, I also felt very strongly that because of the business model AXA was operating, I was going to be able to leverage on that to learn risk management in a much more technical way—and that was my experience.

Let’s talk about Sparkle Business. That’s something you’re promoting now…

One of the things Sparkle Business is passionate about is financial inclusion, and when you look at the financially under-included businesses, you’re talking about SMEs and individual entrepreneurs. With traditional banking, it is time-consuming and challenging for folks like this to have to go and spend so much time in the bank. And so, we are offering a solution like Sparkle Business, where we have features such as inventory and invoice management and we also offer solutions like a payment link.  If I buy a product from a vendor on Instagram, she can send me a payment link, which is tied into her bank account; and that is building her records and financial history, which is going to make it a lot easier for her to get credit and even grants.

We have a solution that allows our Sparkle Business users to do inventory management, take advantage of tax advisory services, and manage their payroll. So what you’re getting is not just a traditional banking app, but really a solution that takes care of the customer’s needs in one total package.

My Life in Tech (MLIT) is a biweekly column that profiles innovators, leaders, and shapers in the African tech ecosystem, with the intention of putting a human face to the startups and innovations they build. A new episode drops every other Wednesday at 3 PM (WAT). If you think your story will interest MLIT readers, please fill out this form.

Shamba Network was founded in 2020—or was it 2021?

The idea came to me in 2020; that’s when I started doing the research. But Shamba itself was founded in 2021, around September or October.

So you’re a year old now. How has it been for you, as a founder? 

Before founding Shamba, I’d actually been involved with another startup. I’m accustomed to the grind in the startup world; pulling long hours is something I’m comfortable with. Not just long hours, but also odd hours. The most important thing in any startup is the willingness and flexibility to be able to learn new things, and adapt and implement changes quickly. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Coming to your work at Shamba, there’s increased agitation around climate concerns, with fears that the earth needs saving. Where exactly is Shamba Network in this conversation?

At Shamba, our mission is two things: putting in place mechanisms that will promote regenerative action to mitigate climate change; and building solutions to help farming communities adapt to the changing climate. So we are dealing with both climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. 

A good example is that we provide data for carbon credit in order to incentivise people to do things like planting trees; and we build solutions that monitor that. We also provide data for insurance for farmers in order to power solutions that provide crop insurance to some of the most vulnerable people.

When you say that you provide solutions to farming communities, what do you mean?

We have two pillars we are working on when it comes to climate change. 

The first one is the pillar for adaptation, where we provide farming communities with access to solutions that help them adapt to climate change. We do this by providing data that can be used for index-based insurance. We operate at the nexus of geospatial data (which is data collected by satellite) and blockchain technology. We bring to the blockchain satellite data and other forms of data that can be used to check if a place has been affected by climate change.

The other pillar is mitigation, where Shamba is providing data that can be used by projects working on regeneration. So, for instance, projects that want to create carbon credit on the blockchain can use Shamba’s data that is sourced from satellite as well as other sources to do monitoring, reporting, and verification, which is basically a way of ensuring that if they’re going to create a carbon credit for a place, they’re able to verify that regenerative action was put up there. And it has had the impact of sequestering a certain amount of carbon. 

So why have you decided to input or host this data on the blockchain and not on any other medium that already exists?

It goes down to the core advantages of web3 and blockchain-based solutions. One of them is transparency. By the very nature of the blockchain, a lot of solutions built on it have enhanced transparency, therefore people find it easier to trust that solution.

For example, farmers in Africa have typically shied away from insurance solutions, because they are not affordable to them and  the people providing such solutions are not trustworthy. But when these insurance solutions are implemented on the blockchain using smart contracts, then they can be fully automated; there is no risk of another party deciding to not honour an agreement because they want to save money. These are systems that are driven by data. When an insurance solution has been baked into a smart contract, it will only wait for the expiry of the insurance contract, and then source data from the outside world to decide whether or not it will make a payout to the farmer if a risk has occurred. 

What’s the digital literacy level of the farmers you work with? How do you ensure you’re carrying them, and any other stakeholders in the agricultural sector, along? 

We use a lot of emerging technology, quite all right. We are deep in the Web3 space and are building a lot of smart-contract-based solutions. We are using cutting-edge data from satellites—what is called remote sensing data. In addition, we are also using a lot of cutting-edge analytics using machine learning and artificial intelligence. But the people who are going to be using the solutions we’re building don’t really need to know about these technologies that are in the backend. 

So what we do with the farmers we work with is, we educate them and build their capacity to understand solutions such as crop or livestock insurance. We teach them how to interact with the solution, show them its benefits and what they should expect from working with it. But we don’t really go into explaining geospatial analytics or smart contracts or the machine learning running in the backend. 

Let’s talk about green bonds in Africa. We’ve had just 16 green bonds issued to the continent. Is that good or bad?

I think it’s good. A bit small, but it is definitely building momentum.

Why are we where we are with these bonds? And what could be better?

Green bonds are in their infancy in Africa. I think this is part of the paradigm where people are starting to become very climate-focused and looking at the climate economy. This is a rethinking of the financial system that allows us to put environmental conservation at the core of the economic system—being able to get to a point where funds can be pooled and used for activities that have a huge impact on the environment. 

I want us to talk about Africa’s absence in the carbon credits conversation. Why do you think this is?

When it comes to the carbon credit space and the voluntary carbon market, the methodologies that have been accepted for creating carbon credits are not applicable to Africa because they are designed for large landholders—people who own 5,000, 10,000 hectares of land, basically big ranches, as you are likely to find in the Global North.

Across most of Africa, as well as across Southeast Asia and Latin America, you have smallholder farmers—people who typically own less than five hectares of land, where they grow their crops to feed their own family and only sell the tiny remainder. The methodologies that exist for creating carbon credits are designed for places where people have large holdings, they cannot be applied in Africa. 

One of our biggest missions at Shamba is to fix that issue and come up with methodologies that would be applicable for creating carbon credit on smallholder farms; methodologies that find a balance between the rigours of monitoring, reporting, and verification. 

Are you currently raising at Shamba?

We’re planning to raise a seed round, probably in December 2022 and early 2023. We’ve had some interest from some investors.

How much do you plan to raise?

A million dollars.

What will you do with the money?

The seed round will help us get to our milestones, which are going to help us get to the next fundraising. One of them is that we want to finish developing our software, roll that out, and enrol a certain number of farmers onto our platform, people who will be using it to create carbon credits, and use the platform as a community to start getting involved in the carbon market. 

But we’re also going to be using those funds to do quite a lot of marketing. We have a lot of products that we’ve built, case in point being our data oracle that is already serving some solutions, such as insurance, all based on satellite data. We believe that if we are able to get this information out there, then we will have more people who are willing to use this technology. 

I want to talk about your value proposition. Climate is probably not number one on the list of sectors investors coming into Africa are looking into. What is your experience with seeking funding, especially with investors who say no to you? 

Apart from the fact that we’re in the climate space, we’re also in the Web3 space. As you know, right now, the crypto space has taken a beating in the credibility department, following the recent FTX fiasco. So, when you’re trying to raise in Web3, in a climate where there’s a lot of fear and doubt, investors’ due diligence process will take a while. But the the people who have told us no haven’t done so because of the uncertainty in the crypto sector. It was rather because earlier on when we had tried raising, we had not yet got to a point where we had traction and a good product-market fit. But now we do, and we are targeting the end of January to become revenue-positive. 

My Life in Tech (MLIT) is a biweekly column that profiles innovators, leaders, and shapers in the African tech ecosystem, with the intention of putting a human face to the startups and innovations they build. A new episode drops every other Wednesday at 3 PM (WAT). If you think your story will interest MLIT readers, please fill out this form.

In this episode of My Life in Tech, I speak to Mori about his foray into cloud computing, the rather amorphous meaning of “the cloud” and his most surprising lesson as a startup CEO.

You studied computer engineering at university.

Yes.

Did you like it?

I really loved university.

What kind of student were you?

I managed to achieve several degrees that were focused on physics. I majored in theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science. I wasn’t very attentive at school. I wasn’t strong at mathematics. I didn’t apply myself as a young teenager. If I could go back in time, I would have spent my high school years a little bit more focused on academics than I did. I only came into my own in university. I was paying for every class [from my student loan], so I didn’t fail anything.

Do you want to talk about what it was like needing a loan for your education?

Absolutely. Not everyone has the same background and privileges in life. I have friends who didn’t need to take out student loans. But, for me, I absolutely needed some support. I couldn’t afford university; I took out expensive loans to pay for my tuition, and I supplemented that by working part-time. I was a little bit crazy; I ended up doing three degrees [up to PhD level]. It took a total of 10 years, and all of that was funded through student loans and working part-time.

How long did it take you to clear your student loans?

Six years.

How did you get into cloud computing?

The cloud didn’t exist when I got into computer science. I think I ended up being a partial expert on the cloud through being a computer scientist and software developer. A software developer builds applications, and they typically need to be hosted somewhere. And before the cloud, we used to host these applications on premise or on computers that sat in our boardrooms and data centres. As a developer, technical lead or engineering manager, there’s this mentality: “You write it, you run it.” Just because you’ve written the application doesn’t mean you just hand it over to someone; if you’ve built it, you typically own it, and that means deploying it, monitoring it, and looking after it, and making sure it doesn’t fall over. 

Amazon Web Services typically built the first public cloud [in August 2006] and all of a sudden, there was this wonderful opportunity: you didn’t have to buy your own servers or build your own internal network team. You could simply rent it, pay-as-you-go, in the cloud. I was responsible for maintaining applications for many companies over the years, and that’s how I ended up in cloud computing.

What was your first job in computer science? 

One of the first real jobs I got after university was lecturing computer science to students. And that quickly turned into me realising academia was not going to get me out of my student loan debt, and I’d better get a high-paying job. So, my first programming job was at a bank in the UK, building financial software.

The last time we spoke, you talked about public misconceptions about what the “cloud” means. From your explanation that day, it seems as though its meaning is still evolving. Where is that definition at today?

The main understanding of the cloud is that it’s a place for backups—backing up your emails or storing your photos. So, people who are not software engineers typically think of it as storage. In reality, it’s not just that. Many people interact with the cloud without realising it. While storage is a fundamental part of what the cloud is, the ability to serve requests from an origin server from a host application is the majority of what the cloud actually is. Whenever you Google something, or talk through Google Meet, or make a request to join a Zoom call, or you refresh Facebook, or search something on YouTube, all of those requests would typically resolve to a software application. And majority of the time, that software application is being served from the cloud, which means that application is hosted or being run in the cloud. That is the quickest definition of what the cloud is: a home or hosting environment for software applications to serve customer requests.

Are you saying everything we do on the internet is hosted and controlled in a concept called the “cloud”?

Generally, yes. I would say the data would speak for itself. In 2022, we will cross the boundary where more applications reside in cloud hosting systems than not in cloud hosting systems. There are still many financial institutions, government institutions, and other industries like manufacturing and healthcare that will still depend on what we call on local (or on-premise) data centres. But the reality is, the technology of the cloud is so far superior that, slowly but surely, all of those previously self-contained, self-hosted applications that were running on-premise will be migrated to the cloud. And that is a large focus of what Deimos does. Our job is to securely migrate a customer from an on-premise deployment to a cloud deployment. 

You said earlier that the cloud did not exist when you started out in computing. Does this description override that earlier assertion? Has the cloud existed since the dawn of the internet, then?

The cloud came after the internet, when Amazon Web Services, or Amazon in general, decided to take their internal hosting and managed platforms and make them accessible to the public, hence the word “public cloud”. There’s different kinds of clouds. The clouds most of us talk about would be in reference to the public clouds, which are Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and my favourite, Google Cloud.

When did Deimos start?

June 2018. 

What successes have you recorded?

I think the biggest success here is that we’re an incumbent. After four years of operation, we are the largest Google Cloud partner on the continent, which means we have the largest number of customers that we support on Google Cloud in Africa. And we have the largest reach. We’re operational in Congo, in Ghana, in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, and we’re currently expanding to other regions. and that’s from a customer perspective from a staffing complement. We’ve managed to grow to around 100 employees, but we’ve done it in a sustainable way, in the sense that, you know, we didn’t take any investment from investors. 

Another area worth mentioning is the calibre of customers that we’ve ended up collaborating and partnering with. We’ve worked with brand-new companies like TeamApt and older public organisations like the Central Bank of Nigeria. We work with publicly listed companies in the States and in South Africa, and with startups across the continent—with a fair amount of business in the UK. 

Why are you helping companies migrate their applications and data to the cloud?

It boils down to the desire to help companies make smart technology decisions, and also to help African companies benefit from cutting-edge technologies like cloud solutions. Our company is focused on helping businesses make smart decisions, particularly from the cloud perspective. It’s imperative to note that migrating to the cloud, if done incorrectly, can be a very costly, difficult and demoralising experience. So having vast experience before starting Deimos, I can help companies mitigate risks. Deimos is assisting companies looking to modernise their software systems. Most people don’t realise that software requires maintenance and constant attention. Generally, companies want to improve their software applications, either because nobody can fix them or because the systems have loads of problems, or they don’t scale, or the user experience is bad. And Deimos exists to help that situation, whether it be a migration to the cloud, or a modification of systems. A lot of the time, we are simply listening to what the business goals are: what is the customer prioritising, and how do we make technology decisions that further those goals and directions?

So Deimos has had no VC investment yet?

There’s been no friends-and-family, no seed rounds, no private equity, and certainly no venture capital, at this point.

The company is profitable, then?

Absolutely. It was profitable from the first month…okay, maybe that’s overstating it. It was profitable in the first month because we didn’t pay anybody in the beginning! We didn’t pay the founders of the company salaries. But as soon as you start hiring [other] people you need to pay them, and that requires some profitability or some personal investment. 

How many people worked at the company that first month?

We started with four people.

Do you have other co-founders?

I have one main co-founder, and that is actually my wife, Jana [Schoeman]. She is not full-time at the company and never has been, but has been absolutely pivotal in its creation, and identifying the opportunity and markets, and then being strategically involved in the company. But I do have actual co-founders, each of them in legal and engineering at the company. They are full-time and have been with us since day one.

Tell me more about Jana’s involvement in starting the company.

Sure, I’d love to. I really appreciate the interest. My wife and I worked in Nigeria for many years, and we both fell in love with the country. I was at a previous company, where I was engineering leader. When the company shut down, I started interviewing at multiple companies in Europe and America. I received multiple offers to join companies—healthy paychecks with stock options and lots of certainty around the role. But my wife encouraged me to take a risk and start something of our own. And I’m forever grateful for that. In terms of guiding operations, and in terms of guiding focus at the company, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are right now if it hadn’t been for Jana. She’s a technologist, a user experience expert, a researcher, and she understands aspects of the African market.

Google recently announced the establishment of a data region in South Africa, its first on the continent. They’ll be working with Deimos on this. What exactly will you be doing with Google?

Deimos is a crucial partner in the Google Cloud ecosystem in Africa. While we have no direct involvement with the launch and operations of the three data centres that will form the new Google Cloud Region in Cape Town, we have the responsibility of working with some of the largest Google Customers in the region. This means we will be assisting our clients in terms of moving workloads from European regions to the new African Region. This is an opportunity to assist our clients by modernising their deployments through infrastructure as code (IaC). This helps with future migrations and recovery.

We will also play a key role in aiding more African companies in adopting Google Cloud. Deimos recently received the first Cloud Security Specialisation in Africa, a rigorous certification process performed by Google that uniquely positions Deimos as the leading cloud security partner for Google Cloud in Africa. Customers wanting to adopt the cloud and take security practices seriously can benefit from what Deimos has to offer. 

In summary, Deimos will have no direct involvement with the creation of the cloud region, but will play a significant part in supporting and ensuring customer success when the region is live.

What challenges has Deimos faced these past four years?

We couldn’t have started a company at a worse time. We started Deimos and two years later COVID hit. Most financial advice would be: “Why don’t you save up six months’ costs, so if something goes wrong, you’ll have a bit of cushioning to prevent you from falling all the way down?” That’s a difficult thing to do, especially when you’re not engaging with capitalisation and investors. 

When COVID hit, we had no money in the bank. We hear about companies extending runway—what’s your burn rate? how much do you have in the bank? how many months of runway? Being profitable negates all of that conversation. But being a bootstrapped startup company, a small business that’s about a year old, you typically won’t have made enough profit to have built up a buffer of six months’ costs. We certainly didn’t. That was probably the biggest challenge—servicing customers and the effects that COVID had on our customers. 

Basic infrastructure has been a problem—internet speeds, electricity, the cost of fuel, and data. In Nigeria, SARS is harassing our staff, accusing them of online fraud. So these are things I hadn’t expected to deal with and overcome.

What is it about being a CEO and founder that has surprised you? 

What was surprising was realising that even though I’m CEO, I can’t just do whatever I want. If you want to build a team that trusts you, that likes working with you, then you need to take everyone into consideration. Just because I’ve made a decision doesn’t mean it’ll happen; there has to be a buy-in. 

My Life in Tech (MLIT) is a biweekly column that profiles innovators, leaders, and shapers in the African tech ecosystem, with the intention of putting a human face to the startups and innovations they build. A new episode drops every other Wednesday at 3 PM (WAT). If you think your story will interest MLIT readers, please fill out this form.

In this episode of My Life in Tech, she tells me about Ìmísí 3D’s core interest in technology education and about her childhood interest that has led her to build a startup for XR adoption in Africa.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

First, is the name Ìmísí an Igbo phrase for “inside the head”?

No. It means inspiration. It’s Yoruba, not Igbo.

Really!

It means inspiring difference and change, and this new reality. But then, going a step further, it really is about making the change actionable and real.

Interesting. So, how did you get interested in extended reality?

I was always super interested in three things: technology, the future, and people. When I was a child, one of my favourite toys was the View-Master. It looks like binoculars, and you can click through these holographic images in it. It’s kind of like a virtual reality (VR) headset. 

I was super pumped when Oculus was acquired by Facebook in 2014; that was a big deal in the space. And then, of course, Google Cardboard came out as well, and all of a sudden, people could start to imagine what was possible. A lot of people say that that is not really VR, but it is like an entry point into it. 

I remember I was just waiting for the Samsung Gear VR to come out—it had been announced—and I got the first one. Once I tried it out, there was no going back.

What exactly does Ìmísí 3D do? What are you about?

To answer that question, one of the things that will be useful is to tell you the three categories of effort in what we do. 

The first is that we have a mission to evangelise. We want to make sure everyday people know what the technologies are—you know what AR and VR and mixed reality are; you don’t think it’s something over there, you don’t think it’s alien. We have a lab, and it is open-access. You can walk in, try stuff out, and ask questions.

The second core purpose for us is: we believe that if we’re ever going to realise the potential of these technologies, then we have to build them ourselves; we have to be the creators. We invest heavily in trying to support a creator community across the African continent. We do meetups, and run events, masterclasses and hackathons all across Africa. We have opened labs in several states across Nigeria. Back in the day, we used to offer scholarships for VR nanodegrees. We do whatever we think can help people start building community. Our third category of effort is that we invest in initiatives in sectors we think have the greatest potential for significant impact. For us, that’s doing work in areas like education, healthcare, storytelling, and digital conservation.

We have spent 18 months working on an Africa XR report and are trying to get it out into the world.

Tell me about the AR/VR Hackathon you’re running in partnership with Meta.

The AR/VR Hackathon is our thing. We’ve been running this hackathon for years. We ran our first hackathon in 2016. By 2018, we had taken the AR/VR Africa hackathon to seven African countries. In 2020, we planned to do it physically in 10 countries, but then the pandemic happened and everything went haywire. So we made it a hybrid event in which 28 countries took part. We got volunteers from around the world to run workshops and masterclasses and offer mentorship sessions; we had about 120 of those sessions. We had a two-and-a-half-month boot camp the next year (because the hackathon started in December the previous year), which ended in a demo day. 

So this year, with Meta’s focus on the metaverse, there’s definitely a lot more interest from their teams on the continent to do stuff related to this and they approached us to ask, “What can we do?” They were interested in doing something similar. In the past, other Facebook teams—not this particular one we’re working with this year—have supported our hackathons. So, this year’s AR/VR Africa Hackathon is still our event, but this time, we are working more closely with Meta to make it happen.

The hackathon is happening in 16 countries from mid-August this year to April 2023. Will that be simultaneous?

The physical in-person hackathon will happen during the first weekend in December, and that will be simultaneous across the 16 countries. For people who are not in those 16 countries, they will be able to hack virtually, and they will be able to do that at the end of November. By the end of the year, we’ll announce all of the winners, and then the first place teams from each country will go on to participate in the boot camp. 

So what has your funding journey been like?

What do they say here in Nigeria—“hot tears”? What would be ideal for folks doing what we do is to have someone say, “Here is a bunch of money for you to run your thing or ecosystem development initiatives for X amount of time.” But what we’ve had is doing events and getting sponsorship for them. In between, we hope for the best!

Is this because XR is not an in-demand solution; that it is rather niche?

The problem is that people are not able to develop skills in this field the way that they should. One should be able to wake up and say, “I’m going to this institute or school where I can learn XR, where there’s a fully functioning lab.” But there’s nowhere you can get that in Nigeria—never mind the equipment. 

And you should know that none of the big tech companies sell their XR hardware in Africa, which is ridiculously expensive and challenging for us. You pay almost double the RRP to get your hands on a Meta Quest. Microsoft has a mixed reality engineering team in Lagos, but its HoloLenses are not here.

What inspires you?

I really believe that if this work isn’t done, it will be catastrophic for the continent and the world. I keep thinking that when these technologies become pervasive in 100 years and come to define almost every aspect of human interaction, what will people [who haven’t prepared for this] do then? And, for me, the answer to that is terrifying. 

The other part of it is: there are some challenges on the continent that I don’t think we will ever solve conventionally. For a sector like education, even if Nigeria was to allocate its entire budget for next year to education, it still wouldn’t be possible, that we could snap our fingers and suddenly there would be enough schools built, or enough qualified teachers. If we’re going to have these infrastructures succeed, we will have to leverage technologies like this to improve education, and things like that. 

My Life in Tech (MLIT) is a biweekly column that profiles innovators, leaders, and shapers in the African tech ecosystem, with the intention of putting a human face to the startups and innovations they build. A new episode drops every other Wednesday at 3 PM (WAT). If you think your story will interest MLIT readers, please fill out this form.