{"id":6430,"date":"2018-05-20T13:18:24","date_gmt":"2018-05-20T17:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.elearninginside.com\/?p=6430"},"modified":"2018-05-20T13:18:24","modified_gmt":"2018-05-20T17:18:24","slug":"biggest-obstacle-nigerian-startups-federal-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.elearninginside.com\/biggest-obstacle-nigerian-startups-federal-government\/","title":{"rendered":"The Biggest Obstacle for Edtech Startups in Nigeria? The Federal Government."},"content":{"rendered":"

In this series of articles, eLearning Inside has explored how certain conditions in West Africa require certain workarounds for edtech startups. The mobile infrastructure<\/a>, a customer base that sticks primarily to mobile devices<\/a>, a diverse population, and a school system that often leaves learners unprepared for the current workforce<\/a> all manifest as both barriers and opportunities. In Nigeria, there\u2019s yet another force to reckon with\u2014the government.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNigeria is one of the most bureaucratic and regulatory-heavy countries in the entire world,\u201d said Sam Bhattaccaryya, CEO of dot Learn. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to get anything done. There\u2019s all these laws and regulations, and that shows up in very business-unfriendly ways.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Popularity of Alternative Currency in Nigeria<\/h1>\n

\u201cFor example, say I want to be able to collect money from a user, a student who might use your service, via a mobile texting service. What you can do is you can collect money from someone\u2019s air time, so you have like 5$ of air credits on whatever network, and if I have an app, I can collect money from that air time. Right now, many people don\u2019t have credit cards, so the way that most people have digital money is literally the air time that they charge up manually onto their mobile network, onto their SIM card or whatever.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Lagos
City Hall. Lagos, Nigeria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One reason this alternative currency has come into popularity, according to Visa\u2019s sub-Saharan manager Hannes Van Regsburg\u00a0(speaking with The Economist)<\/span><\/a>, is that the government imposes even heavier regulations on banks.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMobile apps or websites can theoretically charge users digitally, using their air time accounts,\u201d Bhattaccaryya said. \u201cTheoretically. Not only do you have to get permission and do a lot of integrations with the telco companies that you would want to work with, you also have to get a license from the government enabling you to do that. And those licenses are ridiculously expensive and take months to actually formalize.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the scale of a start-up, you neither have the money nor the time do that, and those are precisely the kinds of companies that need to be able to collect money digitally in order to prove their business models and get things off the ground. Those are challenges that our company has faced before, that companies that are our clients now face, so on that side of things, Nigeria is a difficult market to be in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lagos Has Emerged as One of Africa’s Preeminent Tech Hubs<\/h1>\n

Still, Lagos has grown into one of the largest tech hubs on the continent, drawing even with\u2014and even surpassing\u2014Cape Town and Nairobi in recent years. Many have speculated on the reason why. Yes, Nigeria has the largest population and largest total GDP in Africa. But per capita, Nigeria\u2019s GDP ranks 17th.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Okeke Vincent Chidozie, CEO of Dovichi and DoviLearn, there\u2019s\u00a0 <\/span>something in the water.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"startup\"
Lagos, Nigeria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThere is this atmosphere in Lagos which motivates and brings out the willingness to succeed in everyone,\u201d he said. \u201cYou want to do anything and everything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAfter I completed my first degree in 2009, and completed my 1 year National Youth Service, I returned to Lagos in 2011, and started working in the industry. At that time, I was already eyeing the startup ecosystem, following up with trends and tiding.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe influx of some Lagos based startups within the period of 2011 \u2013 2014 was a strong motivating factor for me, and I believe others.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Chidozie says eventually the city reached a critical mass.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSome of these startups started gaining media recognitions, patronages, partnerships with existing corporations, and of course, funding. Some of these factors were catalysts for many and triggered their willingness to start something. The ecosystem was just promising, with great potentials and wide possibilities.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLagos has a population of about 21 million. It is bigger than some countries. In Lagos, you can sell anything and everything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bhattaccaryya confirms this as well. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s crazy how much energy there is. I think the main reason that Lagos is one of the main start-up hubs in Africa, I would say there\u2019s three, there\u2019s Nairobi, there\u2019s Cape Town, and then there\u2019s Lagos, and arguably Lagos is now becoming the biggest one, the big reason is that Nigeria has the market, in the sense that there\u2019s around 180 million people in Nigeria, so it\u2019s the biggest economy in Africa, it has the biggest population in Africa, but moreso in Lagos specifically, it\u2019s just the energy and the vibe.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of stuff that is now coming up, there\u2019s a lot of companies that have come up in the past few years. The amount of funding that has been given to start-ups in Nigeria has spiked over the last two or three years. By many indications, the companies that are now starting to become big, or are starting to get off the ground, rather, in Nigeria, will in five to ten years be, if not globally relevant companies, at least regionally dominant companies.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s huge success stories like Andela, but there\u2019s other companies as well that have started getting international attention, like Flutter Wave [received funding from venture capital], so did Flutter Stack. They\u2019re both companies that are trying to solve the digital payments issue across Africa. For every one of those companies that have gotten international attention there\u2019s a bunch more that are also doing good work. There\u2019s this co-working space called CCHub. If you go there you\u2019ll see on any given day US ACs that are interested in investing in Nigeria, you have Google senior developers, you have start-ups of all kinds, it\u2019s a very interesting environment now. And I think a lot of it was sparked by recent interest, like Mark Zuckerberg made a tour in Lagos in 2016. Ever since then people have been taking the Lagos start-ups more seriously. I think that the results are now quite evident. Everywhere you go, you get this vibe that things are on the up.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this series of articles, eLearning Inside has explored how certain conditions in West Africa require certain workarounds for edtech startups. The mobile infrastructure, a customer base that sticks primarily to mobile devices, a diverse population, and a school system that often leaves learners unprepared for the current workforce all manifest as both barriers and opportunities. In Nigeria, there\u2019s yet another force to reckon with\u2014the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":6431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-editors-picks"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Biggest Obstacle for Edtech Startups in Nigeria? The Federal Government. - eLearningInside News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The mobile infrastructure, a customer base that sticks primarily to mobile devices, a diverse population, and the school system all manifest as both barriers and opportunities. 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