Africa & Global Power

T he boom brought dollars. The bust brought lessons. What Nigerian startups do next will define the ecosystem for a decade. Nigeria’s startup story has always been told in superlatives. Africa’s most funded tech ecosystem. The continent’s first fintech unicorns. The largest concentration of tech talent in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2020 and 2022, Nigerian startups attracted extraordinary sums of venture capital, riding a global wave of cheap money and investor enthusiasm for emerging markets. Then came the reckoning. Global interest rates rose. Risk appetite contracted. High-profile layoffs swept through Nigerian and pan-African tech companies. Some well-known names shut down entirely. Funding that once flowed freely dried to a trickle. By 2024, total startup funding across Africa fell to just $1.1 billion, a 44 percent drop from 2023 and a staggering decline from the roughly $5 billion raised at the peak. [1] In 2025, the picture began to shift. African startup funding recovere...

G lobal AI companies see Africa as a training data source and an emerging market. African technologists are trying to change that equation. In March 2024, Scale AI’s Remotasks platform — which employed Kenyan and Nigerian data labellers — abruptly shut down operations in both countries after workers logged over 20 hours of work earning less than $1 in total. [1] The same month, Meta, after facing lawsuits in Nairobi, quietly relocated its content moderation operations from Kenya to Ghana, recruiting workers to moderate East African language content from the other side of the continent. [1] These are not isolated incidents. They are the visible surface of a structural condition: Africa contributes its data, its languages, its cognitive labour, and its users to a global AI industry whose value is captured almost entirely elsewhere. The data-labelling market alone is valued at $2.8 billion today and projected to reach $18.3 billion by 2035. [1] African linguistic data — in Wolof, Or...