Teens in tech📡

Apr 01, 2022

Hello Venturer,

What are Nigerian teenagers ages 16 to 19 typically up to? Whatever your guess is, I doubt it includes them being founders and CEOs of cutting-edge startups. But that's gradually becoming the trend as teenagers dominate the tech industry.

I'm talking about the likes of Balogun Pleasant, the 16-year-old founder of Zeddpay, John Oseni, the 16-year-old founder of FutureX, and 19-year-old Emmanuel Njoku, founder of Lazerpay. These young lads are poised to take over tech on the continent and globally.

In this issue of VA Weekly, our blockchain enthusiast, Oluwatosin Ogunjuyigbe, shares how Njoku started a career in tech against familial odds and gained international recognition as a blockchain guru.

Amoo Zainab

Social Media Executive, Ventures Africa

Meet the 19-year-old blockchain guru revolutionising African crypto payment

Lazerpay, a crypto payment gateway startup Njoku co-founded with Abdulfatai Sulaiman and Prosper Ubi, was launched in October 2021. Since then, it has received a lot of praise as a necessary innovation that can accelerate crypto adoption in Africa. Lazerpay is not only solving payments for businesses but also provides them with easy access to decentralised finance (DeFi) features such as lending and staking. Read more.

Investing in smallholder farmers for the future of Africa's agriculture

Investments in African agribusiness remain concentrated on big farms, despite smallholders accounting for 60 percent of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa. With the necessary support, infrastructure and financing, Africa will realize the growth potential of its agriculture sector.

Mechanization helps farmers plant 40 times faster at one-third of the cost. As one of two winners of the inaugural 2021 AYuTe Africa Challenge, Hello Tractor connects farmers with tractor owners, allowing farmers to book connected tractors from their phones and improve their productivity and yields. Investment from AYuTe will deploy 17 tractors in Kenya, creating jobs across the value chain to close the living income gap.

Join Adesuwa Ifedi, Heifer International Senior Vice President of Africa Programs, Jehiel Oliver, Founder and CEO of Hello Tractor, and Samson Odera, a tractor owner who works with Hello Tractor, for this Skoll World Forum Ecosystem Day event on the need for investment in infrastructure for the future of Africa's agriculture.

Why does the e-naira have so little adoption?

The e-naira is not altogether a bad idea. CBDCs have great potential. But six months after its launch, the future of the e-naira looks bleak as there is little to no demand for it. But before we can call it a failed project, we would need to ascertain that it is not fulfilling the purposes for which the CBN launched it. Learn more.

My Pivot Journal: From quality control officer to front-end engineer.

Anisat Akinbani has been fascinated by technology since she was a little girl. But she graduated from school as an industrial chemist and worked as a quality control personnel before pursuing her core interest. Now she is a front-end developer and technical writer, and she will not leave the field for anything in the world. Read more.

FCMB SheVentures is helping women tech founders in Nigeria.

Many factors limit access to funding for single female-founded businesses in Africa. Some of them include poor female representation in investor pitches and limited female-led/owned or female-focused Venture Capital (VC) and Private Equity (PE) firms. Learn more.

This healthcare manager created an app to reduce the prevalence of diabetes in Nigeria

In July 2018, Diekola Sulu launched the ManageAm App to help people living with diabetes take responsibility for their health, efficiently calculating their progress while making healthy lifestyle decisions. Underground work for the app’s development has been on since 2017. Learn more.

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