TechNigeria: A weekly digest of what went down in Nigeria’s tech space

Nigeria, during the week, recorded new rise in its investment opportunities as CcHub added to its initial investment inventory in furtherance to its ambition to provide a platform where technology-oriented people share ideas to solving social problems in Nigeria.

CcHub’s story topped on the mentions table, featuring alongside stories of Airtel’s apologies that trended all week. Also, Nigeria emerged amongst AfDB AgriPitch competition winners, going forward to place Nigeria high amongst top ranking nations who entered for the public competition.

Below is a digest for the week, highlighting the major tech build up.

CcHub’s investment vehicle

Lagos-based Co-Creation Hub (CcHub), during the week, announced launch of its latest provision, an investment vehicle, aimed at empowering investment firms and high net worth individuals (HNWIs) all over the world to co-invest alongside the hub in the most innovative companies across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Being a continuation of the launch of “The Syndicate by CcHub”, a fund pool, the board noted that the new investment vehicle is expected to accelerate the growth of early-stage ventures delivering value-adding services and products to the African market at scale.

The AfDB AgriPitch competition

As widely contested the AfDB AgriPitch competition was, a startup from Nigeria emerged alongside winning startups from Kenya and Uganda. Not intimidated by the over 2000 co-entrants, Nigeria’s Foodlocker won the Mature Startup category.

Earning such respect for Nigeria, the startup won the category for pitching as a medium supporting smallholder farmers with technologies for the production of foods such as tomatoes and chicken. Aside networking opportunities, Foodlocker took home US$40,000 in prize money to scale.

The GitHub surge

Microsoft subsidiary, GitHub, providing hosting for software development and version control using Git, marked 65% Nigerian range, making Nigerian developers the highest contributors to the Git-Hub repository in 2020.

Read also: TechNigeria: A weekly digest of what went down in Nigeria’s tech space

A report containing the stats revealed that contributions by Nigerian developers grew by a record 65.9% in the last year – the highest percentage growth by any country in the world. Analysts have linked the huge growth in the country to several developer internships like HNG and Wejapa that saw a higher number of applications this year.

The Airtel Apology

Also, during the week, Airtel Nigeria apologised to subscribers following prolonged service outage. The public apology came after several Airtel users across the country berated the network provider on the grounds that they could not access internet services for hours.

In what industry experts described as a disaster management strategy, Airtel disclosed that it experienced a network disruption which brought about the lengthy service downtime yesterday and stated that its internet access has been restored. It went on to advise customers to restart their devices in order to regain access to uninterrupted network and internet.

The real Google drive

Tech giant Google launched people-like cards to help Africans who want to be found on Google search. Like businesses create presence on the search engine, the new ideas facilitate the medium to get people discovered upon similar search.

While this could help artists, who are into movie making and music, grow their reach easily, the new facility will equally serve as an online repository or people gallery with firsthand data about individuals. Google stated, in a statement, that anyone with a Google Account can create a People Card by simply searching for their name and tapping the “add me to Search” prompt.

Remarks

These stories, and many others, made headlines during the week.  Join us next week for another edition of TechNigeria.

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