Across the country, there are millions of music lovers like Obishai, who download songs from stream ripping sites or use the free tiers of music streaming services due to inability to afford such subscriptions or plain disregard for the value of the art. According to a report, Nigerians spend an average of 31 hours weekly — much more than the global average of 20.7 hours — listening to music, especially Afrobeats. And while there are now more people who are paying for music streaming platforms than five years ago, it’s not nearly enough revenue for the kind of growth the industry is witnessing.

The global music industry is dancing to the rhythm of streaming, with 67.3 percent of all music revenue worldwide generated from digital subscriptions to streaming platforms. In March 2024, The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) released the Global Music Report for 2023, which disclosed that streaming brought in 67 percent of the $28.6 billion realised in 2023, leaving the sales of physical copies and performance rights trailing behind with 17.8 percent and 9.5 percent respectively.

Sub-Saharan Africa had the fastest growth out of all global regions. It was the only one to surpass 20 percent growth as revenues climbed by 24.7 percent , fuelled by the growing popularity of Afrobeats and Amapiano tunes worldwide. Interestingly, while the Nigerian music industry is the largest on the continent, consistently churning out global hits and achieving billboard ranks; South Africa, the second largest music industry, has remained the most profitable music market in the region, bringing in the bigger bucks. According to the report, the rainbow nation contributes 77 percent to music revenue in sub-Saharan Africa — an impressive 19.9 percent growth from the previous year.

Joey Akan, a music journalist, isn’t surprised by this twist, as he shared that the Nigerian music industry has a long way to go before reaching profitability like its well-oiled South African counterpart.

“South Africans have a more structured industry. They have all their collection society rights which is basically a fanbase that values music and a government that punishes piracy. If you put all of these together, you have a better environment for music to generate more money,” he shared with TechCabal.

“It’s taken us about 30 years to build what this industry currently is, while South Africans were able to clock the system and build a functional industry which works for them. We have the artists to brag about, as well as the fanbases and cultural commitment to Afrobeats, but are missing one of the most important elements, which is the [revenue] numbers. This is why we cannot have access to certain deals and attract certain investments.”

While creatives across the world tussle with the illegal distribution of their work, Nigerian artists deal with a much more sophisticated version where bootlegged versions of their music might be even more popular than the original versions on streaming platforms. Nigeria was named the worst place in Africa to be a creative as it has the largest market in Africa for goods which infringe on intellectual property rights. Original physical copies of albums are almost nonexistent in the Nigerian industry, as pirated copies are already the norm.

Outside of the lack of regard for the value of music, Akan believes that the broader economy also has played a climacteric role in music revenue for the two countries as richer countries are more likely to have higher-yielding industries. The South African rand is stronger than the Nigerian naira, with one rand equaling over 70 naira. 

“It’s not new information that in Nigeria, everything competes with food,” he said. “The money the average Nigerian will pay for Apple Music can be diverted to pay for lunch.”

This means that for music artists in Nigeria, the biggest revenue opportunity lies in their music reaching international audiences across the Atlantic who bring in the juicier revenue; as the majority of their local fans cannot afford to pay for these streaming services.

*Kamal Chude, a popular artiste in Lagos is yet to get the “streaming cake” even after four years of making music, as he doesn’t consider the his earnings significant enough to withdraw yet. *Chude, who is in a two-year contract with a local distribution company he says isn’t transparent at all, has found himself still doing the bulk of the distribution work for his music despite having a 70:30 revenue split agreement. 

“I worked with them on one song, which is my biggest so far, and there isn’t much to show for it on the backends. I didn’t even get access to it until I brought my lawyer into the conversation. We checked the logs and found out that the streaming platforms that were on the list were not up to five. Meanwhile, the song was available on all the Digital Service Providers (DSPs) you can think of,” he shared.

Will partnerships save the music industry?

Distribution and record companies play a vital role in boosting artists and nurturing the industry’s growth, especially in today’s hyper-competitive global market, where social media platforms like TikTok are changing the game with their content-heavy environment.

Tunji Balogun, Chairman & CEO, of Def Jam Recordings, shared that one of the strategies that can be deployed for this growth is forging partnerships. 

“When it comes to music coming out of Sub-Saharan Africa, we’ve partnered with a label from Nigeria called Native. I felt strongly that I wanted to work with people that have a genuine connection to the culture on the continent,” he shared. 

In September 2023, Def Jam signed a Nigerian rapper,  Odumodublvck, who was one of the biggest new artists on the continent with over 252 million Spotify streams. Two of his songs, Declan Rice and Blood on the Dance Floor, were some of the top-streamed Nigerian songs in 2023.

Capital will always move to where it’ll find a profit, and more global labels are partnering with local names. Seventeen months after Def Jam and Native Records signed a partnership deal, Mavin Records, another heavyweight in the music ring, announced that the majority of its stake had been acquired by Universal Music Group (UMG) in a deal that is speculated to be worth about $125 million. The deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2024, will give Mavin artists unhindered access to the resources at UMG, furthering their reach. 

This is excellent for the industry, except that it feels like deja vu for industry professionals like Akan. The journalist cuts through the positivity with blunt honesty, and shares that until the structural problems are solved, the challenges in the industry will erode all positive development. 

“We need to increase the numbers we have outside their [the West’s]  influence. We need to know that they can take whatever percentage of our money and numbers or this crop of artists, and we’ll still have the base to successfully nurture new artists and make money independently in the future.”

In Nigeria, freelancing is a thriving market, especially for creative, non-technical skills like writing. According to the World Bank, there are an estimated 17.5 million online freelancers in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, with most of them being from Nigeria. In its 2023 freelancer report, Payoneer, a payment service used by Upwork, also shared that the countries with the highest number of users outside the USA are Bangladesh, Nigeria, and India. Upwork and Fiverr, another freelance platform, provide freelancers the chance to trade in-demand services for some dollars, but the emergence of artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt this flow. 

Since its release in 2022, the chatbot ChatGPT has been widely used in writing. While some writers use ChatGPT to improve their processes, small business owners are increasingly using it to create content, cutting out the need to hire writers. On social media, for example, there are thousands of videos and threads teaching people how to leverage AI writing and designing tools to secure freelance jobs without any prior knowledge or experience. It is increasing competition in an already-saturated freelance market.

Double the hustle for half the pay

According to Onyi, payment rates for simple gigs on Upwork have dropped significantly in the past year as competition on the app is now steep. Clients went from offering about $100 for 10K words to half the amount as there are always freelancers desperate enough to accept meagre pay.

This situation has led Onyi to secure twice as many clients as she would normally take on in order to meet her income target. This is more tedious, but she’s found tools that make her work faster. According to her, about 60% of the words in her drafts, especially the novels, are generated by AI tools.

“I have to write quickly to attend to the next project,” she shared with TechCabal. “Sometimes I have to write something I don’t know about and so I need these tools. If I don’t take the low-paying jobs, others will, and there’s no guarantee that I’ll get the higher-paying ones either. In the time I’d wait for one $100 job, I could have completed four $20 jobs or two $50 jobs.”

Onyi is not alone, as this situation, coupled with global inflation, is placing additional pressure on freelancers to take on more work. In this report which had 2,000 freelancers surveyed from over 120 countries, 55% of them admitted to taking on more work just to meet up with income demands.

Beyond the most popular freelance marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork, smaller marketplaces also feel AI’s impact on the interaction between talent and clients. Femi Taiwo, CEO of Nigerian freelance marketplace, Terawork, shared that his company has seen a slight decline in the number of gigs available and the rates offered. 

“Apart from the freelancers, I know people who have let their contract staff go because they felt that they were too expensive for the services they were offering,” he said. “After all, why should they pay so much for an analyst when AI can create reports for you?”

According to Taiwo, freelancers on his platform earn more than popular platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, on average, and produce better-quality results.

Toyosi Godwin, a freelance content and copywriter, was forced to leave Fiverr as a result of the paltry pay. Godwin, who has offered writing services for the past five years, shared that, at some point, he was getting offered $5 to $10 per article on the platform. He knew he had to leave to find clients elsewhere. Now, he gets clients mainly from social media, which guarantees significantly more pay.

Godwin is aware a lot of writers use AI tools to save time and take on more work. “When you get paid this small amount for your work, you will likely not want to invest a lot of your time and effort into it,” he said. 

The bulk of gigs on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are targeted towards freelancers from the Global South, and this is evident from the low compensation offered. A 1,000-word article can receive as low as $20 as payment. A sizable number of clients who cannot afford or are unwilling to pay for full-time staff outsource on these sites, specifically targeting talent who are desperate enough to accept these rates. In this global freelancers report by Payoneer, freelancers from Africa and Asia have lower hourly rates on average, compared to their counterparts in North America and Western Europe.

[ad]

Projects with higher price tags are more expensive, in terms of time, money and qualifications. According to Onyi, these gigs with higher pay typically state clearly that only writers from certain countries like the United States, are welcome to apply. 

“Getting good projects from Nigeria is difficult, and most clients immediately lose interest as soon as they realise that you’re Nigerian or black,” she shared. 

These gigs also cost a lot to secure for new freelancers. On Upwork, users need “connects”, which are essentially tokens used to bid on job opportunities. One hundred and fifty connects cost about $30, and the higher the job’s pay, the more connects you need. 

“If you can’t afford to pay for connects to secure better jobs, then you’re stuck with the low-paying ones,” Onyi said.

Redefining the value of work for freelancers

Jasmine-Jade, a freelance writer for over five years, typically has a lot of clients and doesn’t need to use freelance marketplaces. According to her, the bulk of her freelance opportunities come from referrals and inbound marketing, as opposed to what she calls “sitting on platforms and waiting”.

Because a lot of these clients come to meet her, she’s able to set her rates which are higher than if she were on a freelance marketplace where the price already was specified and hundreds of people are already bidding.

While she’s had several friends and colleagues lowballed by clients on these marketplaces, it’s not something that she has experienced herself.

Despite market realities, Taiwo believes that freelancers can still get paid decent rates depending on how well they position themselves and offer value.

“Now, freelancers, especially in Nigeria, have to provide more value beyond what they were doing before that will make them stand out,” he shared. “There are AI tools for graphic design but people still employ graphic designers because they know that the result they’ll be getting is more unique.”

According to him, while AI is threatening the value of freelancers, the effects of the 2023 layoffs make up for this decline, and more businesses are laying off full-time staff to employ freelancers as they have realised that it’s a less-expensive alternative.

“Some freelancers might be losing jobs and getting paid less but some are seeing more opportunities now,” he said. “If you have a track record of doing good, quality work that people can see, then people will always see your value.”

Pamela Ephraim, a journalist, understands the concept of value as a freelancer on Upwork. The writer and editor who started using the platform in 2022 had a hard time finding well-paying gigs at first. After two projects which paid her $10 each, she reached out to someone with more experience navigating the platform who put her through a series of Zoom meetings, profile optimisation tips, and YouTube tutorials. She updated her profile to show all her work qualifications and added useful writing samples, and she was strategic about applying only for projects within her niche and a certain pay range, as that gave her some exclusivity.

“In about a month, I landed my first $150 gig which was for a 1,000-word article,” Ephraim said. “I’ve been on the platform since then.”

Ephraim no longer has to apply profusely as she did in the beginning and her profile now brings in gigs she didn’t apply for. According to her, apart from writing convincing proposals and optimising your profile, one of the most effective tips she can share is to treat freelancing as one would a full-time job.

“Initially, I treated it as a part-time hustle and didn’t put a lot of effort into it,” she said. “You need to treat it as you would an actual job and also ask clients to leave good reviews. Platforms like Upwork thrive on good reviews.”

When asked if she wasn’t bothered about being phased out of employment by AI, she said she didn’t think it would ever happen. The future of freelance storytelling belongs to creatives who cannot be replaced with AI, she said.

A week ago, when Titilayo had ordered the shoes from Lagos and the vendor asked what delivery options she preferred, Titilayo hadn’t realised that the real cost of the price difference between the options meant not wearing the shoes for her wedding at all. She had been presented with three options: ₦18,000 for next-day doorstep delivery via DHL; ₦7,500 for doorstep delivery which would take three to five days; and ₦5,000 for a package drop at the nearest motor park (the delivery station), from where she could pick the shoes up. Titilayo lived less than 10 minutes away from the park and three to five days seemed like a reasonable wait time for her shoes to arrive; she chose the third option. 

Her shoes did get delivered to the station all right, but Titilayo had already worn something else for her wedding: a pair of champagne-gold sandals her sister had hurriedly purchased from the nearby market that morning. They were nothing close to what she wanted, but she didn’t have the time to be choosy.

Titilayo is one of many customers who have to experience delayed deliveries due to the increased cost of more efficient methods.

In February 2024, DHL increased the prices of their deliveries in Nigeria by 100%. Their reason was pretty obvious: the naira was devaluating and increasing operational costs for the company faster than they were able to make profit. 

In the past month, the price of sending a 2kg box that’s about 45cm in length and 20 cm in height from Abuja to Lagos via DHL has increased from ₦20,000 to ₦39,000. People might be able to justify paying exorbitant delivery fees for more expensive items like generators or refrigerators, but not a lot are willing to pay that much for shoes or dresses. This has pushed small business owners in the country into exploring other delivery options which are more tedious, delay-laden, and unsafe.

In an email sent to partners in February, DHL wrote:

“As a network business, we face the constant pressure of balancing currency exchange rates and we make the necessary budgetary decisions to counteract these effects where possible. Unfortunately, the situation in Nigeria has continued to surpass our budgeted levels.

“To ensure operational continuity and keep connecting the world with high-quality service, DHL will levy a Currency Surcharge to all Time Definite International (TDI) shipments. The surcharge percentage will be 100 percent, effective March 1, 2024, and is applicable to transportation charges.”

Iman Muhammad is the founder of Iman Hammad, a fashion brand based in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. The businesswoman, who has a large customer base in Lagos, shared that she’s lost several customers in the past two months due to the inflated delivery costs.

Express deliveries from Abuja to Lagos used to cost about ₦20,000 via DHL and were affordable for most of her clients until the price hike on March 1. Now, the same package costs about ₦48,000, which many clients find unreasonable. 

“To some extent, I understand them,” she shared. “How do you buy a dress for ₦45,000 and spend over ₦40,000 transporting it?”

To meet her customers’ demands for swift deliveries, Muhammad began going to the motor park in Jabi to waybill the items so they reached Lagos the next day. Despite being cheaper, it soon proved to be unsustainable as it was an incredibly stressful process. 

“I got a lot of calls from clients about how rude the drivers were, which was affecting my brand,” she said. “And even when I got a dispatch rider in Lagos to pick up on my behalf, it was such a hassle coordinating the entire process, and so I gave up.”

Now, Muhammad uses SendBox, a logistics service based in Abuja. While it takes about five working days to deliver clothes to clients outside Abuja, it costs her about ₦7,000 for each package—about the same amount she paid for waybills.

When logistics companies broke into the Nigerian e-commerce space, their premise was simple: providing a faster way to send parcels from one part of the country to another. Unfortunately, the naira came tumbling, crushing everything in its fall, including promises of logistical ease. As long as economic factors strain the logistics sector, small businesses and consumers will be locked in a battle between affordability and efficiency.

Hera Samaila, who lives in Abuja, runs Hera’s Closet, a popular social media clothing store in Lagos. While a large number of her customers are within the state, she has a healthy client base in other cities outside like Abuja and Port Harcourt. In the four years since she’s been running her store, she has experimented with different delivery channels in a bid to find the most sustainable option for her buyers in other states. 

At first, Samaila started using night buses to deliver to clients as they were cheaper than options like DHL and arrived the next day. She soon realised that this option was risky business as she was left stranded after several incidents involving broken-down vehicles and truant drivers.

“These people [the motor park drivers] have no insurance for your items, and if anything happens, you alone will bear the cost,” she shared. “I get a lot of customers now who ask me to use that option so they get their orders faster, but I don’t oblige.”

While Samaila has found an interstate delivery service that costs between ₦6,000 and ₦7,000 and takes three days on average, there are still some customers who complain about the costs. 

Samaila has tried several different tricks to lessen the load of delivery fees for her customers. Some of these include subsiding delivery costs, an endeavour she soon had to give up as it was eating into her profits; arranging for shared deliveries; offering stockpiling for up to three months; and even driving around Abuja to drop off packages herself.

Lola Oyegunle, who sells shoes on Instagram, typically uses a small air freight service to bulk-send orders to cities like Abuja and Benin and then have her representative there dispatch individual orders. According to Oyegunle, this ensured that her clients received their parcels in good time and was also cheaper than using the service for individual doorstep deliveries.

In the past two months, however, the price of next-day deliveries has doubled, forcing her to seek out other delivery methods, all of which take longer to arrive.

“I have to explain to customers that not only have the prices of shoes almost doubled due to the currency devaluation, but that delivery costs have followed,” she said. 

The cost of an economy one-way flight ticket from Lagos to Abuja now ranges from ₦90,000 to ₦145,000. In October 2023, these tickets sold for between ₦55,000 to ₦70,000. Within the last four months, flight prices have risen as high as 100% in some cases, with stakeholders blaming jet fuel prices and other operational costs. 

Osita Okonkwo, chief operating officer of United Nigeria Airlines, shared that the naira inflation has affected multiple facets of their operations, including the purchase of aviation fuel, which first went from ₦800 to ₦1,000 per litre in October 2023, and then rose to ₦1,300 in February this year.

According to him, all airlines operating in the country were forced to increase their prices or face even more losses than they currently do.

Oyegunle now uses slower but cheaper delivery methods and uses only the air freight service for specific customers who request next-day deliveries. 

International deliveries aren’t left out of the price-hike conversation. In December, shipping a 2kg parcel from Nigeria to the United Kingdom cost about ₦30,000 and ₦33,000 to the United States and Canada. In the past month, however, these fees have almost doubled. 

Sending a 2kg parcel from Nigeria to the UK and the US now costs about ₦65,000 and ₦75,000 respectively via companies like ShipNaija, according to Muhammad.

Fuelled by rising internet penetration and the youth population, Nigeria is one of the largest markets for e-commerce in the world, with a projected revenue of $2.6 billion by the end of 2024. The last-mile logistics space has fed into e-commerce growth and is now one of the fastest-growing on the continent despite the challenges facing the sector. In the past year, the sector has been hit with a number of policy challenges including a fuel subsidy removal and currency devaluation which have significantly affected operations.

In just one year, Ima transformed from being a lawyer into a successful lifestyle content creator. With 144K followers on TikTok, 32K on Instagram, and 14K on YouTube, she is on top of the creator platform trifecta —YouTube, Instagram and TikTok —that is dominating the video content landscape.

Her journey began in 2021 when she beat procrastination and started her YouTube channel: something she’d wanted to do since her university days. Like many other lifestyle content creators,  the COVID-19 lockdown provided a great opportunity to start a career in content creation. There’s a large audience across the continent and the majority of creators want to target different kinds of audiences – as many as they can – on these three platforms. 

Despite starting on YouTube, it was its newer competitor that carried her to social media popularity. Less than a year after she began posting consistently on the app, her chaotic vlogs and hilarious storytimes drew the attention of a predominantly Gen Z audience, earning her over 100K followers in a matter of months. While TikTok’s demographic ranges from individuals between the ages of 10 and 50, the highest percentage of users on the app are between ages 10 and 19. Ninety-five percent of YouTube users, on the other hand, are between the ages of 19 to 29. 

Social media is complex, and each platform requires a unique process for creators looking to navigate and build an audience. While having an audience on TikTok has been beneficial in helping Ima grow her other platforms like YouTube and Instagram, she believes that building niche audiences for these platforms still requires a lot of work. While storytelling thrives on TikTok, its competitor, Instagram, prefers more fast-paced content. 

“In my personal experience, Instagram prefers content that’s more curated as the app is still slightly more formal than TikTok,” she shared. “TikTok, on the other hand, prefers more organic content with a lot of face time. 

Ima believes that to be successful on TikTok, one must have consistency and offer value, even more than other important traits like authenticity. 

“No matter how authentic you are, or how great and interesting your stories are, if you are not showing up every day, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Also, you have to be offering value to people. Being consistent and offering value in your unique way is what people see as authentic.”

Crafting stories that resonate as a lifestyle content creator

Hamda Koya was working at an ad agency in 2021 where she frequently collaborated with many digital creators for marketing campaigns. As someone who loved to explore places and document these via pictures and videos, she found the concept of being a creator fascinating and decided one day to try her hands at becoming one. This spontaneous experiment led to the birth of The Lagos Tourist, Hamda’s Instagram page. Her content, which is upbeat and happy — a characteristic she says stems from her personality, has attracted 62,000 followers on the app. 

According to Hamda, the secret to being a successful lifestyle content creator is crafting compelling stories that grab the audience’s attention in the first three seconds — a universal truth in the world of marketing. Whether it’s sharing spontaneous adventures or scripted rants, her ultimate content creation strategy is spinning engaging narratives that keep her audience hooked from the beginning. 

“Your video editing skills might be great, and your videos might be nice, but if they can’t find a way to draw attention in the first two or three seconds, you’ll lose the audience,” she said.

While she shares that she’s not so organised in terms of sticking to schedules and calendars, she uses content buckets that help with an overall sense of direction in regard to what she’s looking to share. 

“I sit and think of what would be funny, relatable and engaging, and then write the script for it.”

In November 2023, Hamda moved to Canada and has been more strategic about the kind of content she puts out. She aims to collaborate with Canadian lifestyle content creators as a way to break into the Canadian creator scene and diversify her audience, which currently consists predominantly of people in Lagos.

Community is the bedrock of creating

For Amaka Amaku, who has about 20K followers on Instagram, creating content means sharing her everyday life with people online—something she does with an uninhibited flair. She has always posted content on her Instagram for the purpose of sharing, which eventually helped her connect with people and build a community there. It wasn’t until 2019 that she realised that she had built a career out of it. In the year that followed, she got her first brand deal. Beyond publishing photos and videos on her account, the entire concept of creating is one that she enjoys as it allows her to view her everyday life through more curious and interesting lenses.

Amaka also has a TikTok, and while she believes that you can share the same content to both platforms, you still need to optimise for each. 

“Instagram started as a photo-sharing app, and while we now have reels, the attention span of a lot of the audience is still short,” she shared. According to her, the videos on Instagram need to be shorter, have a catchy sound, and be more fast-paced to gain traction

On the other hand, TikTok loves storytelling, in her experience. “If you want to do well; just tell stories. People love hearing what you did, how you did it, and where you did it.”

Whether on Instagram or TikTok, she tailors her content for each platform’s unique audience, understanding the need for brevity on Instagram and the love for storytelling on TikTok.

Amaka’s content is charming, and she shares that a lot of it stems from her resolve to create content from a place of ease and authenticity. This influences her collaborations, as she prefers to partner with brands that allow her to create exciting, organic content that aligns with her brand. 

“The perception I hope people have of me and my content is of a girl just living her life and enjoying it,” she shared with TechCabal.

From creator to influencer 

Social media marketing has become one of the most effective ways for brands to reach newer markets, and digital creators who can lend their platforms are in high demand. Being an influencer or lifestyle content creator in a market like Nigeria is unpredictable, as there’s not a lot of structure. Unlike mega influencers and celebrities who get paid a ton of money to promote on their accounts, micro and mid-tier influencers sometimes have to grapple with fair compensation and unreasonable demands from brands. For new lifestyle content creators, this can be a problem. 

“Some people believe content creation is easy and think you don’t deserve to be paid a lot,” Ima shared. “Regardless of how easy or simple it looks, a lot of time and effort goes into creating and editing content. There’s also been a lot that’s spent on building the community these brands to take advantage of.”

For Hamda, working with brands as an early creator was smooth as she had already understood the environment and had built relationships with a lot of other marketers. Several brand collaborations came from her within her existing network, and attending various events within the niches she was interested in. 

One afternoon in 2018, Tosin Samuel, popularly known as TSpices, posted a step-by-step photo recipe for vegetable soup (Efo Riro) on Instagram. She had no idea that the single decision would forever change her social media experience and, consequently, her life. In a matter of hours, DMs and notifications poured in, with hundreds of people leaving messages and comments about how useful and amazing the food and recipe were. In three days, the number of followers she had on the app climbed from 100 to 5,000. 

TSpices, whose demeanour is cheerful and bright, continued posting food recipes, photos and then videos, growing her audience. She’s now one of the most followed food creators in the country, with about 1.1 million combined followers on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.

If you’re active on social media, you probably already know that Nigerians are one of the biggest content consumers on the internet. According to this report by the World Economic Forum, Nigerians spend the longest time per day on social media, with the average user logged in for four hours —two hours more than the global average of two hours and twenty-seven minutes.

Fareedah, a social media food creator, was diagnosed with an ulcer in 2019. This came with dietary restrictions, so she had to make a lot of adjustments to her diet. After signing up for an online nutrition class, Fareedah decided to make efforts to create healthy meals for herself, despite not being great at cooking.

She started sharing food content on her Instagram, and soon began to receive a lot of comments about how good and healthy they looked. In no time, Fareedah built a community of about 14,000 followers on the app that revolved around healthy home-cooked meals. Her followers consist mainly of young people who are committed to eating well whilst exploring more ways to be creative with food.

“People started to ask me for recipes and were recreating my meals,” she shared with TechCabal over a call. “It became some sort of accountability group for people who wanted to commit to eating more healthy foods.” 

Culinary schools in Nigeria typically cost upwards of ₦50,000, which is almost twice the minimum wage. This means that the most efficient way to learn how to make a great amuse-bouche is via the Internet. For Nigerians, it makes better sense to learn to cook from other Nigerians, as there are certain cultural nuances that these creators have. 

For example, Omuah Bello, a 27-year-old stylist who likes to cook, didn’t understand why she and her family didn’t enjoy the creamy pasta that she prepared. She tried different recipes from different creators on Instagram and YouTube until she eventually found one customized for the Nigerian palate by former Nigerian chef, Chef Obubu. This recipe had a lot less cream and a lot more seasoning, which made more sense to the Nigerian palate.

While TSpices started with local Nigerian dishes, she has since moved and now incorporates food from different cultures around the world, which her audience loves. According to her, one of the most noteworthy things is that she makes these meals more accessible to the average Nigerian in terms of ingredients used and processes.

When she started, one of the biggest challenges for her was her location. Residing in a small city like Lokoja means that she doesn’t have access to certain ingredients that can only be found in large stores. She had to make good use of the ingredients she had available at the time or use substitutes for some parts of the recipes, and so far, it has worked for her. TSpices’ ability to adapt and create alternatives with locally available ingredients resonates with the belief that everyone, regardless of location or resources, can embark on a flavorful culinary journey.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that certain foods are too fancy and people can’t prepare them [at home],” she told TechCabal. “If certain ingredients or tools are too difficult to source here, I find alternatives that work just as well for my audience, so they know that you can cook these nice meals from anywhere.”

Food content on social media blew up in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people worldwide who were constrained to their homes started cooking to pass the time or spark joy, with nearly all of their favourite food spots closed down. Since then, food has become one of the most popular content categories on social media. Sharing videos, pictures and recipes of food has become a growing trend on social media, with the food hashtag on Instagram having about 519 million posts. On TikTok, #food has amassed over 555 billion views. The fusion of technology, creativity, and a genuine passion for food has democratized culinary knowledge.

Juliet, a social media vendor, has learned to cook a lot of meals from Instagram. Before coming across a recipe on TSpice’s page, she only ate her white rice the Nigerian way; with stew. Now, she makes a mean stir-fry sauce, which she got right on her first attempt and is now one of her favourite things to eat. 

Since then, she has been able to replicate a wide variety of the foods and drinks she’s seen online. She now runs an online food business in her city, where she sells various meals ranging from stir-fry sauces to ramen noodles — all of which she learned to prepare from Instagram. According to her, the popularity of Asian mukbangs on TikTok, which are videos of people eating large quantities of food, typically Asian food, has helped her business. 

Influence and consumption have now become indistinguishable from each other, and the culinary revolution has spilled over into real-life dining experiences. Kizito, a chef at an Abuja restaurant, shared that social media food content has influenced the kind of meals people order at his restaurant, with millennials and Gen Z skipping the jollof rice for ragu pasta. 

“When the waiters inform me that someone ordered a Nigerian dish like rice and plantain, I can already tell that they’re an older person, or a foreigner looking to try Nigerian food,” he shared. “The younger people want food they see creators cook or eat on social media.”

Replicating foreign dishes means that some knowledge might be lost. In December 2023, Twitter went abuzz with conversations around fake products and dupes, with ingredients like soy and Chinese sauces being the most popular. People like Judith have unknowingly used the dupe for years as they weren’t familiar with what the original product looked like, or even what it was made up of.

“No one told us what original soy sauce looks like, and so we just go to stores and buy anything that has soy sauce written on it,” she shared.

Fareedah understands the influence that creators have, and she believes that it is important to use their platforms responsibly. Before she shares recipes, she does a lot of research and test recipes before sharing them. 

“People watching things on the internet will replicate new stuff as long as it looks good and so you have to make sure that you know what you’re sharing,” she shared. “For example, what are the health implications of certain ingredients? We don’t want to encourage overconsumption of unhealthy foods and ingredients.”

Food creators have emphasized the evolving role of social media in shaping culinary norms and preferences, especially in a country like Nigeria where the love for food and community runs deep. From TSpices’ affordable recipes to Fareedah’s journey towards healthy cooking, these creators have built communities and contributed to a cultural shift in culinary exploration: challenging the notion that certain dishes are reserved for specific culinary schools or expensive ingredients.

In a world where a single Instagram post can spark a culinary movement, these creators remind us that the kitchen is not just a physical space but a vibrant, evolving community where flavours, cultures, and stories converge.

CDCare is one of the major BNPL providers in Nigeria, alongside CredPal, Zilla, and Carbon Zero. They operate in a market where retail credit is in its very early stages. In 2023, only about 6-10.5% of Nigerians formally accessed a loan, with the rest having to borrow from family and friends.

According to Tobi Odukoya, CDCare’s CEO and co-founder, the effects of inflation on their business have been particularly interesting.

“We have seen a lot of new customers who now have to spread payment as they cannot afford one-time payment for their wants,” he shared with TechCabal. “There’s now a new set of Nigerians who now have less disposable income and can now only afford to pay in installments what they used to be able to pay for in full.”

At the same time, however, inflation has cancelled out a whole demographic of former middle-class Nigerians who now cannot afford to pay for any wants at all. 

This surprising trend highlights the evolving nature of lending financial products in a challenging economic climate.

This is the same for CredPal, another player in the Nigerian BNPL space which launched in 2018. In a response shared with TechCabal, Fehintolu OlaOgun, CredPal’s CEO, shared that the inflation has driven growth for the company. 

“It has affected the purchasing power of people, but it has also been a driver for growth as people are more interested in spreading payments as opposed to paying in full,” he wrote.

He, however, shared that the startup is incredibly critical of this high demand and has employed even more stringent measures to confirm the eligibility of customers. Prior to this, KYC requirements for CredPal were work details like office address, salary range, salary date, and other personal information. Now, users are mandated to provide functional work IDs before accessing credit. Unlike CDCare, CredPal has a strict credit limit for users and only allows them to purchase items within a stipulated amount based on their credit history or ratings.

The chaotic credit market

Nigeria is not the greatest market for credit and BNPLs are not the only players suffering from this as neobanks and other lending platforms are staggering under the weight of non-performing loans. Carbon and FairMoney, both players in the Nigerian lending space have both seen their profits take a dip as a result of impaired loans. While a part of this can be attributed to the moral standing of individuals, a larger part is perhaps the economic situation in the country.

Prices go up nearly every day, and for the average Nigerian, this destabilizes their finances and leaves them with even less to repay loans.

*Eno, a 24-year-old graphic designer in Abuja, defaulted on the repayment for a laptop she purchased from CDCare in 2023. A six-month repayment plan turned into seven as the amount she allocated to her essentials became insufficient due to the increase in transport fares, forcing her to eat into the funds for repayment. 

“I’m probably banned from the app now,” she shared with a chuckle. “But I really did everything in my power to repay, including trying to borrow from lending apps and asking for a salary advance.”

It took her three weeks past the due date to complete her payment, and in that period, she received a barrage of calls and messages from the platform. 

“I reached out to them via every single platform I could think of. WhatsApp, texts, emails, calls, etc to request for an extension but nothing worked,” she shared. 

CDCare lets users spread payments for as long as one year; delivering the items halfway through the payment cycle. For their vehicle instalment payments, users get up to three years to complete payments. This extended payment period is strategic according to Odukoya, who shared that the repayment rate on their platform is quite high – as high as 90%, he maintained. 

Last week, TechCabal reported that Zilla, another BNPL startup, pulled the plug on its BNPL offering. This came after it faced extended low patronage and complaints from buyers who favoured other platforms like CredPal and CDCare for their longer repayment periods. They allowed a maximum of four months for users to complete payment on items. 

Before BNPL, Odukoya affirms that they’re first an e-commerce company, and that shapes how they’ve structured their platform. Unlike players like CredPal and Zilla which provide a list of vendors in various categories on their app for users to make their pick, they (CDCare) bypass the need for merchants by dealing directly with the biggest distributors. This does two things: help them guarantee the quality of products and ensure lower prices – both of which have been instrumental in helping them stay ahead in the Nigerian BNPL superiority race.

Optimism has been unable to stop the naira’s fall

In January, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that the inflation rate is expected to drop to 23% this year and consequently 15.5% by 2025, due to the foreign exchange reforms introduced by the central bank. These reforms include monetary tightening which the CBN governor, Yemi Cardoso, disclosed in December 2023. 

In spite of this, the naira has tumbled aggressively in 2024, depreciating 31% to reach N1,400 on January 30. 

Zuleihat Yakwari, who runs a home appliances store in the country’s capital, shared with TechCabal that business is incredibly slow. Most of her customers now prefer to patronize declutter pages on social media where they buy used appliances from people relocating to other countries. The rest, like those who use BNPL platforms, prefer to pay in bits. Sometimes, she has to sell some of her products on declutter pages for reduced prices, because they just need to go.

“People are no longer paying ₦100,000 for a microwave. They’ll rather buy one another person has used on Instagram for ₦30,000.”

According to Zuleihat, the prices of appliances go up every time she goes to restock, and so the people who insist on brand new appliances, majority of whom are newlyweds or intending couples, have started paying months in advance: an initial deposit to “lock down the item,” and then the rest in bits. 

“As much as the prices are high, people know they will go up even higher, and so a lot of them are now paying very early to avoid regret,” she shared. 

According to him, who shared that they’ve had countless situations where prices increased mid-payment in the past, the way they’ve navigated this has been through continuous and clear communication with customers. So far, the customers have been understanding.

Understanding, however, is not the currency that covers the price difference, and some users have had to cancel their buying plans on the app due to increased prices. 

CDCare offers a car financing plan, which offers customers up to three years to pay for their vehicles. Unlike their other products, car financing is only available to people resident in Lagos. 

Adedeji Olowe, a finance expert, is not convinced that this is a great market for large payments like cars, as other lenders are already shutting down.

“The current macroeconomic situation does not permit digital lenders to make such offerings,” he shared.  

As Nigerian BNPL startups navigate the country’s inflation and economic uncertainties, the dynamics of consumer behaviour are shifting depending on their economic class. While they’re seeing an entire category of buyers being phased out as a result of reduced purchasing power, they’re also witnessing growth amidst the demand for instalment payment options. This growth path is one to be treated with both optimism and caution, as it ultimately depends on the broader economic narrative, which is currently shaky. 

Sanusi Ismaila moved from Lagos to Kaduna in 2014 to set up a technology hub that trained people to solve real-world problems. He believed it was essential to inspire and cultivate tech ecosystems outside of Lagos because local issues need to be solved by locals who understand the nuances.

After a while, he ran into his first problem: no talent pipeline to sustain startups nationwide. So, he went one step backward on the value chain to produce the talent needed to build high-quality products and startups.

In 2016, Ismaila launched CoLab, and it became Kaduna’s first tech hub and the second in northern Nigeria. Today, CoLab is a community for those building tech careers and dreamers looking to connect and learn from each other. 

Lagos is to the Nigerian tech ecosystem what Silicon Valley is to the North American ecosystem. Yet, unlike the United States, where other states like New York, Seattle and Chicago still have thriving ecosystems that complement Silicon Valley, tech ecosystems outside Lagos struggle to build their identities or grab significant attention from stakeholders. As a result, some of the best tech talents from these regions frequently feel the need to migrate to more viable regions to attract better opportunities.

After a brief conversation with these men,  he discovered they were CoLab members; the following month, he signed up to learn data analytics. Six years on, he now works at AltSchool and is the director of people and head of data science programs at CoLab while still living in Kaduna.

What started as a small community of young people wearing hoodies and sitting around with used HP laptops has become one of northern Nigeria’s biggest tech talent pipelines. CoLab has over a thousand alumni, with some collaborating to build startups like Sudo Africa and others working in organisations like Paystack, Microsoft, and Google.

The community became such a force that in May 2022, the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir ElRufai, provided them with seven hectares of land to set up a campus and train even more tech talents.

Excel Ajah, who built writersgig, an online platform for freelance writers, has struggled with finding tech talent, and he believes that this is a significant contributing factor to the slow growth of the tech ecosystems in the East. 

“Because ecosystems like Lagos are more advanced, it’s easier to find people who can do exactly what you want,” he shared. 

The tech ecosystem in Imo State is in its earliest stages and didn’t begin to take shape until 2020. According to Ajah, its inception can be traced to when he and a couple of people started hanging out in public facilities to work and discuss other tech ecosystems like Lagos. In no time, they attempted to replicate these communities and events they saw in Lagos and soon organised The Owerri Business Week and Social Media Fest, which attracted a lot of attention and have become annual events.

While still running writersgig, Ajah launched Silicon Africa, a tech innovation centre dubbed after its counterpart in San Francisco. With a new company came hiring needs, which was where he encountered his first challenge. Scarcity of talent. It was difficult for Ajah to find strong developers in the region to work for his company, so he began training them instead.

“Some of the early developers I hired still work with me and are now senior developers who now train other early-stage developers in the centre,” he shared. “This has been interesting to watch because it has become a cycle, and those they train now train others.” 

For Chidi Duru, another founder who operates from Owerri, the problem of the ecosystem in Imo precedes a scarcity of talent. For him, it’s a lack of interest in learning tech skills driven by the popularity of internet fraud in the region, especially in the past years. Duru’s tech hub, CodeAnt, provides coding classes to young people with support from Google, but it is still difficult to convince young people to focus on learning tech skills. 

As a founder, building from Owerri limits him from a network of people who understand what he’s building. Recently, in Lagos, he walked around at a centre wearing a CodeAnt hoodie merch and had a couple walk up to him to discuss the classes and company. 

“This has never happened in all the years I’ve been wearing our merch in Owerri,” he shared while laughing. “I even contemplated moving to Lagos for some minutes.”

While it’s a lot of work, Duru says that he’s committed to putting in the work to ensure that aspiring tech talents in Owerri have a space that’s dedicated to their growth and learning. So far, they’ve trained about a thousand young people with coding and digital marketing skills.

Beyond a talent pipeline, Lagos has a more structured ecosystem that encompasses the talent, the investors to fund these ideas, and the media to tell stories about said ideas. In newer ecosystems like Imo, for example, securing avenues to tell their stories on the centre stage can be difficult. Most tech media is focused on more vibrant ecosystems like Lagos, which makes getting their attention “a bit challenging,” in the words of Duru.

During a fireside chat in January, Sim Shagaya, the founder of u-lesson and Miva, both Abuja-based ed techs, shared that one of the reasons why tech ecosystems outside Lagos have struggled is a lack of structured institutions in these regions. Before the rise of the tech industry in Lagos, it was already home to tertiary institutions like The University of Lagos, Lagos State University other private and open universities, providing it with a high mass of young people from these institutions to feed into the tech ecosystems. 

This population, which is a blessing in this case, could be its blight. Pablo believes that smaller ecosystems are the best place to learn and get into the tech space as they offer the intimacy of organic communities.

According to Pablo, the tech ecosystem in Kaduna isn’t trying to be like Lagos. The more conservative state has a culture and rhythm that is slower and smaller compared to Lagos, and he doesn’t think that will change anytime soon, as it works perfectly for the people operating in the region.

“It gives participants a chance to build without a lot of noise and pressure, which is especially important for people in the early stages,” he shared over a call. “ People do not feel the need to perform for a large ecosystem, and there’s a lot more space to interact in communities and gain access to the things you need as there’s less competition.”

Ochai has spent the past 20 years working between the creative industry and the tech sector in Africa and has created a space for herself at the intersection of these two fields. Now, her work revolves around providing support to tech startups that are building for the creative industry.

Beginning as an arts and administrative assistant in 2006, Ochai rapidly moved up the ladder at the British Council, and in May 2010, she became director of arts in Nigeria and West Africa. By 2018, she was director of programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, where she started working on creative economy projects across the continent. According to Ochai, her background in tech made her particularly curious about how technology was impacting activities in the creative sector and social space. So she delved deeper into exploring that, one research paper at a time.

This curiosity eventually brought her to the doorsteps of CcHub, where she is excited about making emerging tech mainstream, among other things.

Ochai and two other Nigerians—Khalil Nur Khalil and Obi Nwosu— sit on the board of BTrust, a bitcoin non-profit set up by Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey and rapper Jay-Z to support bitcoin development with a focus on Africa and Asia.

She regards her work at BTrust as transformative, and the entry point into her journey into that space was curiosity. In 2017, while working at the British Council, she commissioned a study on how arts and culture practitioners were leveraging tech in their practice. Driven by curiosity, Ochai dove head-first into a research rabbit hole until she eventually landed on the most fascinating answer: bitcoin. 

“I was fascinated by the opportunity in blockchain and bitcoin,” she shared. Before then, she’d had minimal interaction with the digital currency, and although she’d bought some in 2013, she had no sense that it was going to be a big thing. “If you’ve been in the creative industries, you’ll know that there were a lot of issues around licensing, royalties, payments, and cross-border remittances, and I got fascinated by the opportunity in blockchain [and consequently bitcoin] to solve that,” she said. 

And so, when, in February 2021, Jack Dorsey put out a tweet looking for three board members for BTrust, she signed up.

The entire process included four rounds of interviews and an essay, where she hesitantly shared her theories on how the creative economy could leverage Bitcoin to grow. This impressed Dorsey because, in November 2021, she was sent a Google Meet link for the final stage of the screening process.

“I don’t think I knew it was the last stage,” she recalls. “I just got on a Google Meet, and there I am, on a call with Jack Dorsey. How is this my life?”

That same year, Ochai left her job at the British Council to cofound the creative economy practice at CcHub. This pivotal decision came after she analyzed the creative industry and digital economy in about 94 countries, which made her realise that it was getting more difficult to distinguish between the creative industry and the digital economy, as their value chains were intertwined. 

Ochai already believes in the core purpose and direction the previous leadership at CcHub had established: providing support to founders building tech-based solutions for social impact. 

“There won’t be a dramatic shift in how the company runs,” she shared over a call on a Friday afternoon. “Much of my effort will go towards staying on track rather than charting an entirely new course.” 

She, however, shares that she will be building on the current foundation to expand further thematically and into more countries across the continent. 

Expanding thematically means that CcHub will be paying special attention to emerging tech like blockchain, artificial intelligence(AI) and intelligent automation (IA) with their main focus being how to mainstream it into the current work being done. 

“If these emerging technologies like AI, bitcoin or blockchain, are going to revolutionise the world, then we can’t just be interested spectators. We have to be participants,” she shared.

Currently, the company supports 24 startups across Nigeria and Kenya, with its main focus being edtech. It is running an accelerator for startups to receive up to $100,000 in non-dilutive capital and six months of acceleration. CcHub also has its eyes on the creative industry and is backing early-stage startups like Nollydata which aggregates service providers in Nollywood, and Orange VFX, a visual effects company. 

“We’re consuming, and it’s great, but who on the continent supports the people building the tech for creative industries?”

Outside of emerging technologies and the creative economy, another area Ochai is looking to bring mainstream is climate and environment. She believes that builders in the ecosystem must pay attention to how issues like climate change can impact other outcomes like health and the economy and find ways to innovate around that. CcHub will also be supporting founders in building solutions to adapt or mitigate the changes currently happening due to climate change.

In December 2023, Ochai was named MD of CcHub following its founder and former CEO Bosun Tijani’s appointment as Nigeria’s minister of communications, innovation and digital economy. For twelve years, Tijani led CcHub from a small innovation centre in Yaba, Lagos, to becoming one of the most noteworthy tech hubs on the continent, with centres in Kenya and Namibia. Now, Ochai, who shares that she has always been a CcHub fangirl, has stepped in to lead the company, with a staff strength of about 200.

Predictions for the creative and digital economies

According to Ochai, one of her biggest predictions for the digital economy and creative industries is the emergence of more robust business models for our content industry, something quite different from the linear business models we have now. 

“You make content, you stream it or you take it to the cinema,” she shared. “[However], I feel like we haven’t maximised the opportunity for the IP assets that we’re generating in our content industry.”

Intellectual theft is still a huge problem in Nigeria despite the IP laws available. The majority of the population has remained ignorant of these laws, and this, coupled with the country’s weak legal system, has affected the growth of the creative industry. 

Another forecast she gave for the creative economy is the advent of infrastructure investment or more specialised services around the creative industries. Nigeria’s creative industry employs some 4.1 million people and is projected to contribute $100 billion in 2023.

“We’ll see more companies build for the creative industry around support like agents, talent managers, and other service providers. Think about insurance, or pensions—all of the things that make an industry work.”

“One of our biggest challenges has been that a lot of people don’t understand how credit works and think it is about owing people,” one employee who asked not to be named told TechCabal. “Most customers would rather wait until they have the complete amount of money to pay than get one now and pay in instalments,” the person added.

The company confirmed the decision to pause its BNPL offering to TechCabal and said it “had a couple of things to figure out.” The company claimed that “resuming the service is in the works” without sharing any specific timelines. 

Zilla was launched in 2021 by Tolu Abiodun and has about 100 merchants that provide various products and services that customers can pay for in two to four instalments.

Despite sluggish adoption, two categories that performed fairly well were electronics and beauty products from high-end stores, as these are typically too expensive for the average consumer to pay for at once, said one person close to the business. 

But even these high-performing categories provided a problem: customers wanted more than the maximum four months Zilla provided to finalise payments.

“The economy is tough, and people need more time,” said Joshua, who runs a gadget store registered with Zilla. “Customers who want to buy now and pay later for phones or laptops prefer to use other services like CDCare, as they give you a chance to pay for as long as a year.”

Victoria, a vendor who sells wigs and other beauty products, has had about five customers use Zilla in the two years since she joined the BNPL service. Two of those five customers eventually asked Zilla for a payment extension as they found completing payments after four months challenging.

Pivoting to cross-border payments?

Zilla’s new product, Zillawire, processes foreign transactions with suppliers on behalf of merchants. According to information on their website, merchants are required to upload their invoices as well as the account information of the supplier for this service.

On the reason for building a cross-border payment product, the employee shared that the company noticed that a lot of their merchants were having some issues with their international payments for their products and wanted to do something about that. According to her, Zillawire, which launched in August 2023, performed better than expected and so the company is focusing on that now. 

Yemisi Isidi moved back to Nigeria from the UK in 2017, and after seeing how difficult it was for businesses, especially women-owned ones, to scale, she decided to do something about it.  At first, she started helping small business owners utilise social media to grow their businesses until that seemed inadequate, and then she moved into providing micro-loans through a company she started, Triift Africa. After a while, even that became inadequate as she discovered that beyond finances, entrepreneurs required a lot of structure and good management to thrive, and so she decided to step up to that. Yemisi, who graduated from Aston University in Birmingham with a degree in Accounting and Business Management started to provide advisory services to business owners. 

In the last two years, Yemisi Isidi has been involved in the disbursement of over $10 million to early founders and business owners. She has also been invested in providing technical advisory to enterprise programs, as well as mentorship and access through various accelerators and incubation programs like the She Leads Africa program and The Future Female Business School which was set up by the UK-Nigeria Tech Hub to support young female tech founders. Some alumni of these programs include Medsaf, Shuttlers, and Auto Girl.

For Centre Stage, TechCabal had a chat with Yemisi on the role of mentorships in building sustainable businesses.

How would you describe yourself outside of the work that you do?

Yemisi Isidi: I am a very driven and passionate person. I care deeply about seeing things grow, whether it’s a business, idea, or community and this shapes whatever it is that I do. I like to see people live better lives and a lot of times I am grateful that I get to contribute to that through my work.

At an event some weeks ago, you mentioned that you didn’t agree with the narrative of female founders being over-mentored. Please can you speak about that some more?

YI: The popular saying is that female startup founders are over-mentored and underfunded. I agree with the underfunded path and I’ve seen a lot more effort in that regard with programmes intentionally focused on putting money in the hands of female founders, whether startup founders or SME business owners.

But when we say female founders are over-mentored, then I don’t agree. Mentorship covers a lot of things, including operational advice. If you have an investor who gives you money, but isn’t holding you accountable and doesn’t understand your industry enough to give you professional advice or access to a valuable network, then there’s a very high chance of you failing, despite the money and this is applicable to both male and female founders. 

Startups that were part of local incubation or accelerator programmes are more likely to succeed, and it’s not just about money but also access to a network and accountability structure that supports their growth. We’ve seen startups that were on the brink of folding but were resuscitated by their local investors. Not just with money, but also with them being able to rally and provide management with the support that they need to pull them through the process. 

Underfunded and over-mentored just sounds like “Give me the money and leave me alone to do the work.” But there are bigger questions that need to be answered to build a sustainable business,  questions like if they know how to do the work and if they’re always going to be motivated when doing the work. There needs to be additional support beyond funding that makes it easier for people to build profitable and sustainable businesses, and this is a gap that mentorship covers. So yes, women are underfunded, but there is still room for mentorship.

What are some of the benefits of mentorship to early-stage founders that people don’t pay attention to?

YI: There are so many benefits, but I will share two. First, it gives you access to a network community, which makes it easier to get external funding, especially when you’re part of a recognised mentoring programme. But most importantly, it makes it easier to bootstrap to generate internal funding. Perhaps the mistake here is when we think about funding, we’re thinking of another person who is not a customer giving you money, but there’s funding that is your business being profitable and having healthy cash flow, and I’ve seen how these mentorings and training make it possible for businesses to achieve this more quickly.

Another investor spoke to us about startups not necessarily requiring a huge investment to start operations in the early days. What do you think about that?

YI: Businesses do need money for operations, licences, research, etc, depending on what they’re building. Finding investors early makes it possible to focus on building the business rather than trying to look for other streams of income to sustain it, so money is essential in making growth happen faster. However, it is not always straightforward. I think that a lot of money stifles innovation and problem-solving, especially when there is no accountability. Corporate Governance is already a big issue in our ecosystem. Too much money where there is no solid foundation, assured integrity or product market fit can be a problem. Even when you have a clear path to success, we have a very unpredictable market so it’s important to think about how to build sustainably from the beginning.

What are some of your most important wins in the past years?

YI: Over the past two years alone, have been involved in enabling access to over $10 million in funding for early-stage startups and businesses across six African countries.  I’ve also worked with about 700 entrepreneurs across Africa to build investment-ready and profitable businesses and aided them in accessing available funding opportunities. 

In 2017, I organised the Illorin Digital Summit which had over 1000 people in attendance from different states across the North Central and Western parts of Nigeria. That work has now evolved to become Cirkle Labs which is an innovation hub that has worked directly with over 4000 young people and businesses, improving their digital literacy to get local and international jobs. We also have helped over 3,500 businesses become more efficient through technology and digital literacy.

At Triift Africa, we are currently working with up to 1000 underserved businesses to access our savings platform, a community for peer-to-peer support and collateral-free loan that works for their business model and makes it easier for them to grow. We also launched Start by Triift Africa where we are addressing the unemployment in Nigeria by making it easier for students and recent graduates to start and grow micro businesses. 

What are some things you have learned along the way in managing Triift that you wished you had known at the beginning?

YI: Based on my work with Triift Africa and an operator supporting startups across Africa, I have seen the importance of thinking and paying attention to the numbers from day one. It is very easy to get carried away with the passion you feel and the problem you want to solve that you don’t pause and ask yourself how to consistently capture some of the value you create for others to ensure that you are profitable and sustainable. This is also why I am very passionate about financial literacy for entrepreneurs. Thinking about the numbers, how to cut down costs, how to keep a financial record, and how to improve revenue and profit, will help you make better strategic and data-driven decisions.