By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Lagos is cementing its position as Africa’s tech hub, backed by the state government, buoyed by dollars from multinational entities.
With such foreign cash, Nigeria’s most populous state of 20 million, which makes N50 billion as monthly internally generated revenue (IGR), is also angling beyond its rank as the fifth largest economy in Africa.
IBM announced on June 12 that students from the Universtity of Lagos (UNILAG), alongside those from Addis Ababa University and University of Nairobi, are among the first intake of 200 computer engineers and scientists from eight African countries for a camp in December 2019.
They will camp for quantum computing at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg which IBM Q Network collaborates with on the continent.
Quantum coding is an experimental science being researched to succeed current computer technology, as IBM seeks to take hold of commercial opportunities in Africa.
Additional camps will be held across the continent hosted by 15 universities.
Microsoft Corp had announced on May 15 its own $100 million plan for an Africa Technology Development Centre (ADC) with sites in Nigeria and Kenya over the next five years to 2024.
IBM is competing with Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants to build computers to solve difficult real-world problems currently beyond the reach of the most powerful conventional supercomputers.
State suppport
Ikeja, the capital of Lagos, has a thriving Computer Village where N25 billion worth of business is transacted daily, catering for the tech needs of Nigeria and its neighbours, among them Cameroon and Benin Republic.
The state government began creating in 2017 coding centres for residents to learn computer programming for free and establish coding firms.
On the table is a N25 billion Trust Fund from which residents with any viable business plan can access startup finance or acquire skills for better jobs or grow Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
Facebook, Google also in
The equivalent of Silicon Valley in Nigeria is in the Yaba area of Lagos, home to Andela and other tech startups where computer graduates learn coding to work for foreign firms and earn hard currency without having to travel.
Bloomberg reports that century-old buildings in Yaba house a vibrant technology cluster that has caught the eye of Facebook and Alphabet owned by Google.
The Yaba area, home to the Yaba College of Technology (Yabatech) and UNILAG, is an emerging technology ecosystem — from fewer than 10 startups in 2013 to more than 60 today, including businesses like booking site Hotels.ng.
It also hosts digital labs for Nigeria’s oldest bank, First Bank, and Stanbic IBTC, the local subsidiary of Africa’s largest lender.
“Lagos, like other major cities such as Nairobi and Accra, is at the height of this exciting expansion in innovation across tech, with Yaba quickly finding itself at the center,” said Chimdindu Aneke, Programme Manager of platform partnerships for sub-Saharan Africa at Facebook.
Last year, Facebook launched a hub space in the Yaba neighbourhood.
Fola Olatunji-David, Head of Startup Success Services for Google Launchpad Africa, said Lagos has a “buoyant, characteristic ‘anything-can-happen’ feel,” fed by budding entrepreneurs seeking to address socioeconomic gaps with Google technology.
Google Launchpad Africa started a development boot camp in Yaba in 2017.
How Yaba was conceived
Yaba’s path into the spotlight started from the bottom up, bolstered by a grassroots movement that lobbied for support from a government not immediately sold on economic benefits of technology.
The group’s first success came in 2013 when, anchored by the Co-Creation Hub – which now manages a space for Facebook and partners with Google to run programmess – it convinced the authorities to waive taxes for a company, MainOne, that agreed to lay Yaba’s internet infrastructure.
“That was how Yaba was conceived: to demonstrate the power of people being connected and the socio-economic impact that would have,” said MainOne’s Regional Executive for West Africa, Kazeem Oladepo.
In April 2018, Lagos hired the global consultancy company, Accenture, and in July Vice President Yemi Osinbajo took local startups to Silicon Valley as the state announced it was launching a project to develop the Yaba cluster.
By August, the government purchased 30,000 square metres of land around Yaba to expand the area that it hopes will create more than 250,000 jobs.
It has only been up from there, as the government realised the internet technology ecosystem offered a way to boost an oil-reliant economy slowly recovering from crude’s slide to a 12-year low in January 2016.
From past to future
“In the past, Nigeria’s billionaires were traders, and oil and gas moguls,” Osinbajo, who heads a Technology Council, said in a September speech.
“But in the next few years, billionaires from Nigeria will be techies.”
Ido Sum, a partner in venture capital fund TLcom Capital LLP, which runs an office in Yaba, has seen Lagos, a city of as many as 20 million people, emerging as the “go-to place for tech in Africa.”
“If you are hungry for Africa investment, it is becoming clear that Lagos is one of the first places to go,” said Sum, who has been investing on the continent for eight years.
TLcom has three of its five investments in Nigeria, including Kobo360, headquartered in Yaba and described by Sum as Uber for truck drivers.
Many local entrepreneurs often see the city’s physical and technical challenges as an opportunity, according to Bloomberg.
Lifebank, which connects blood banks to hospitals in poorly mapped Lagos, bases its entire business on overcoming problems — both in delivery and communications.
“These are the problems locals can solve best,” said Lifebank CEO Temie Giwa-Tubosun, who plans to expand her business to Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire or Senegal by 2020.
Such adaptability may prove to be a boon as technology companies seek to capitalise on what global tech giants call the “next billion users” — young people still not using the internet in poorer populations in Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
“Yaba’s surpassed my expectation of what it could achieve,” said Bosun Tijani, a leader of the grassroots movement and co-founder of the Co-Creation Hub that’s incubated startups such as Lifebank.
“It has given the tech community in Nigeria an identity and made people in every part of the country believe that technology is possible here.”
IBM is working on bringing quantum computing to commercial applications, and expects revenues from this to come through as soon as 2021, said Chief Executive Officer, Ginni Rometty.
That opens the field wider for Nigerian computer techies, particularly Lagosians, to earn dollars at home working for European and American firms abroad without visa hassles and the risk of illegal immigration.
