Beyond Lagos: The Quiet Rise of Startup Ecosystems in Kano, Ibadan and Port Harcourt

The pitch competition was in a repurposed office block in Ibadan, and the most striking thing about it was who was not there: the usual Lagos venture crowd. No investors flown in from Ikoyi, no Twitter-famous founders, no photographers. Just twelve local teams, a few regional angels, and a mentor who had come down from Lagos and kept marvelling that he had never bothered to visit before. "Everyone acts like Nigerian tech is one city," he told me afterwards, a little embarrassed. "I've been in this industry seven years and I never got on the expressway to look. There's real building happening h…