How Yaba, a Lagos suburb with a technical college, became the home of Nigerian tech.
Yaba’s universities, fibre connectivity and the Co-Creation Hub helped make it Lagos’s technology cluster, nicknamed “Yabacon Valley”.
Yaba is a suburb on the Lagos Mainland. With its educational institutions and technology startups, it is considered the technological hub of Lagos. The area is home to Yaba College of Technology, the University of Lagos, and several federal institutions, and in 2021 the Mobolaji Johnson Central Station opened there, linking Lagos to Ibadan by one of Africa’s few standard-gauge rail lines.
The hub that opened the neighbourhood
The tech space in Yaba became popular in the early 2010s, when Bosun Tijani and Femi Longe’s Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB) opened as a social innovation centre on Herbert Macaulay Way. Accounts differ on the exact dates, but they agree on the effect: CcHUB’s programmes and co-working space drew developers, entrepreneurs and startups into the area. Reports say more than 120 companies have passed through CcHUB.
Companies including Hotels.ng, CcHUB and Andela helped make Yaba a technology centre, and Paystack, founded in 2015, was acquired by Stripe in 2020. The nickname “Yabacon Valley” followed.
Why Yaba
Observers point to a deep pool of young people from the area’s colleges, improved internet from fibre-optic cables arriving around the same time, and partners such as MainOne, Omidyar Network and the Lagos State Government who helped with infrastructure.
Not every company has stayed. Some, such as Konga and Andela, later moved elsewhere in Lagos, and Tijani himself has pointed to infrastructure as the next challenge for any cluster. For founders, Yaba remains a lesson in how a single hub can seed a whole district.