Why Most Technology Fails in Nigeria, and the Model I Believe Will Actually Work

By Yinusa Yakubu Temitope

There is a pattern I have noticed after years of building in Nigeria. It shows up everywhere, in every sector I have touched, and it took me a long time to name it clearly. Nigerians do not adopt a solution because it is good for them. They adopt a solution because it makes them money or prevents them from wasting money.

That is the whole filter. Everything else is noise.

Good Intentions Are Not a Business Model

If you build something because it improves health, do not expect mass adoption in Nigeria. Health, as a standalone value proposition, only resonates with a narrow upper class that has the income and the education to think in terms of prevention. The average Nigerian does not think about prevention. They go to the hospital when they are sick. That is the extent of their relationship with health as a category. Prevention is a luxury of people who already have money to protect.

Food works the same way, but for a different reason. Nigeria does not have a food scarcity problem. Food is everywhere. So if your pitch is built around aggregating food or making food more accessible, you are solving a problem that does not exist for most people. Abundance kills that pitch before it starts.

I have spent years trying to introduce software into the Nigerian ecosystem, particularly to SMEs, who make up the overwhelming majority of businesses here. And I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that software as a category means nothing to this market. AI means nothing. Automation means nothing. None of these words carries weight on its own. What carries weight is a direct answer to one question: will this put more money in my pocket, or will it stop money from leaving my pocket?

The Companies That Got It Right

Look at the companies that have actually penetrated the Nigerian market at scale, and the pattern becomes obvious.

Moniepoint and OPay did not sell technology. They sold access to money, either by helping people save it or helping people make more of it. That is the entire value proposition stripped down to its core.

ChowDeck did not sell convenience as an abstract idea. It gave restaurants a new channel to sell food, which means more revenue for them. And on the consumer side, it saved people from spending money eating out when they could order in for less friction and often less cost.

Spiro is another clear case. It gives riders control over their vehicle costs, which means savings. And it increases their earning capacity as bike operators, which means more income. Two sides of the same coin: save money, make money.

Every solution that has actually taken root in Nigeria fits this same shape. Anything that does not fit this shape, no matter how well designed or how technically impressive, struggles to find traction. This is not a cultural failing. It is a rational response from people operating with thin margins and no room for anything that does not pay for itself immediately.

Building Guarantor Around This Insight

This is the thinking behind Guarantor. Instead of trying to convince SMEs to adopt software because it is good practice, we are building a model where the software arrives as a consequence of something they already want: capital.

The plan is to raise venture capital investment, not bank loans, targeting one million dollars initially, and deploy it directly into high-growth potential SMEs. Most SMEs here do not run one clean product line. They sell a mix of groceries, produce, and general goods all at once. Our first job is to work with them to identify which product or service is actually driving their strongest sales, and to focus resources there.

From that point, we go deeper than capital. We help them implement proper standard operating procedures. We bring in full consulting and business analysis. We give them software processes and a proper financial and bank reporting system that most of them have never had access to. Then we inject between ten thousand and one hundred thousand dollars into each individual business, usable for operations and inventory.

We are deliberate about location too. We are not spreading ourselves thin. We are choosing the strongest candidate areas, where the conditions for growth are already present, and concentrating there.

The target over the next three years is to have these businesses embedded into our system to the point where accounting software, inventory software, process software, and even payment processing all run through infrastructure we control. Where a partner like Moniepoint is involved, the relationship is not about revenue share. It is about them contributing capital to deploy into these SMEs in exchange for the payment gateway usage, the data and analytics that come from operating inside that ecosystem. Win-win.

Our five-to-ten-year goal is one hundred SMEs, each generating up to a hundred million naira in annual turnover, each capable of scaling from a single shop into multiple locations. That is what collective prosperity looks like when you build it deliberately rather than hope for it.

The Real Mechanism: Extraction Follows Adoption, Not the Other Way Around

Here is the part that matters most. Once a business has used our funding for a year, we begin extracting repayment. By that point, they are already making consistent payments, and they are in a strong enough position to negotiate convenient loans from banks directly, loans that let them scale further and repay what we gave them initially.

And by that point, something else has happened. They have gotten used to our software. They have built their operations around our systems. That is the moment we can begin charging for the software and for the deeper technology layers we introduce afterward.

This is not an accident. It is the same mechanism OPay used to take over the Nigerian market. First, offer an incentive that gets people to use the solution. Then let the solution become so embedded in their daily operations that leaving it is no longer a real option. That is how OPay democratized access to financial services in a market that had every reason to resist a new player.

We are applying the same logic, except our incentive is not a wallet. It is capital, structure, and a path to scale that these businesses could not access on their own. The software comes later, disguised as infrastructure they already depend on.

That is the only way I have found to introduce technology into Nigeria and have it actually stick. You do not lead with the technology. You lead with money and let the technology become the thing they cannot operate without.