Africa’s most populous country is the biggest startup market most likely to give birth to unicorns. But capital and infrastructure to help these startups scale remain elusive.
THE YEAR 2018 WAS momentous for Staff bus.ng, a two-year-old startup helping solve the problem of congestion in Nigeria’s capital city.
Its solution? Encouraging residents to leave their cars at home and book its luxury buses for their daily commute to work.
Founded by Olusegun Oludayo, the startup was recently the winner of the N5 million ($13,700) Seyi Tinubu Empowerment Project (STEP) initiative, a pitching competition held annually in Lagos to identify leading tech entrepreneurs.
This program, along with many other venture capital (VC) initiatives, has sprung up in Africa’s largest economy in the last decade to help boost the startup ecosystem in Nigeria.
According to a 2017 report by Global Startup Ecosystem Report and Ranking 2017, produced by Startup Genome in collaboration with the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), the Lagos startup ecosystem is estimated to be worth $2 billion. It has one of the highest rates of founders who have an undergraduate degree (59%) and those that have a technical background (93%).
However, when it comes to global penetration of these startups, there seem to be some significant challenges with only 11% of startups planning to take their business beyond the shores of Nigeria.
“We have a proliferation of similar ideas all trying to get funding from dwindling sources and those with funding just go around that circle of pitching, pitching, pitching. They don’t scale, so you find they remain startups for many years,” says Emilia Asim-Ita, CEO, AML Practice, a content, talent and resource advisory firm.
This story is from the December 2018 - February 2019 edition of Forbes Woman Africa.
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This story is from the December 2018 - February 2019 edition of Forbes Woman Africa.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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