An interesting piece by Femi Longe, programmes director at the Co-Creation Hub almost got buried on YNaija, it was a stroke of luck that I happened on it and fished it out. At the very least, I’m glad that at least one of the CcHub-ers doesn’t think that proactively engaging with ecosystem issues via blogs is too far down the totem pole of priorities to be bothered with. For what it’s worth Bosun’s tweets re the Tiketmobile matter (you’ll have to scroll down till the 28th of July) make for interesting reading, and could even have been a blog post.
But enough of that and back to Femi’s piece, which has quite a few chunky nuggets in it. He says —
While there is eagerness for the big exits that characterize the glamour of Silicon Valley, such outcomes will not happen if we do not focus first on building depth of the ecosystem and quality of the startups that emerge here…
The quality of ideas and the depth of the local talent pool. We could talk about this for days. I’ve already said that African developers need to up their game.
In the absence of investor money with which to play, Nigerian tech entrepreneurs need to master the art of bootstrapping and building businesses that generate revenue from day one.
Nigerian techie who reads only TechCrunch and swears by CrunchBase, this one is for you. You probably should also read about Editi’s WMD model for Nigerian startups. Not immutable, but still.
If the mass of Nigerians get online today, they still have very limited options of optimally-designed, locally-relevant services to engage them to meet their every needs. Building these services in anticipation of the floodgate should be our priority.
If I nodded my head in agreement any more vigorously, it’ll simply fall off.
Working with relevant stakeholders including government to break down the barriers keeping most Nigerian consumers from the game should be our focus.
Working with government…Nigerian government…is always a serious judgement call, but it wouldn’t very pragmatic to ignore their ability to make things happen. The other evolved technology ecosystems that we look up to are all beneficiaries of immense government patronage, direct or indirect, at their early stages. So even if we’re wary, I think we should be very interested and even follow up on the government’s stated intent in the national broadband policy, proposed tax holidays for tech startups retail logistics agreements with NIPOST and more.
Thanks Femi, and please don’t stop blogging.
I hope we can get him to zoom in on more specific ecosystem matters soon. Read the original article on YNaija.
Femi Longe: Nigerian tech ecosystem – Depth first, exits later (Y! Policy Hub)by Femi Longe Of the 10 best startups in Nigeria in 2010 according to techblog www.techloy.com, none has gained major traction since then and most have died. This could be ascribed to the age old stat that majority of new businesses world-over die in their early years of operations or could be […]
