The Nigerian Startup Ecosystem Record

The problem

Nigeria’s startup ecosystem is full of organisations that convene people and move money. Very few can show evidence of either, and the connections between them are held in people’s heads. Lists of hubs and funds exist, but they go stale, link to sites that have died, and repeat an organisation’s own description with nothing behind it.

What we did

We built it ourselves, because the value is in the graph and nobody held it.

Each entry is read from the organisation’s own website. The record keeps the sentence it came from, the page it was read on and the date, so a stranger can tell what an organisation does and see why we think so. An organisation can claim its entry and correct it.

What exists now

A live public record with search, a map, filters by what an organisation does, and a front page that shows how much of it has been confirmed by the organisations themselves. At the time of writing that is one entry out of 111.

What it produced

Reading the sites turned up compromised websites, dead addresses and domains taken over by gambling sites. It also showed an ecosystem that runs programmes and rarely writes cheques. Both are written up in the field notes.

What we learned

The hard problem is not building the record. It is how a record stays true after the people who built it get busy. The field notes explain what we tried and what we got wrong: field note 06 and field note 07.