Sitting on a bar stool on a Sunday night John Adeyeye Snapchats selfies as he waits for spicy tomato and goat stew at Buka New York, a Nigerian restaurant in Brooklyn. The room is dimly lit and corrugated tin adorns the walls. Adeyeye, 22, left Nigeria when he was eight years old and recently decided to reconnect with Nigerian culture. The decision, he says, came after he met other Nigerians through his computer science program at a college in Brooklyn. He says they didn't know he was Nigerian until he told them his last name. His friends recommended Buka as a place where he can eat authentic Nigerian food and practice Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s official languages.
"I’m trying to reconnect with my Nigerian brothers," said Adeyeye.
Adeyeye isn’t the only millennial looking to reinforce connections with Nigeria. Millennial Nigerian-Americans are more educated than the general population and are also finding employment in management, business, science and the arts at a higher rate, according to Census estimates. To top it off, the population of millennial Nigerian-Americans has increased by 79 percent since 2005.
Many young Nigerian-Americans are returning to Nigeria because they see it as a place to pursue a career in a job market that’s less saturated than here in the US. Additionally, with a newer tech sector they see more opportunities for innovation.
At the same time, an increasing number of young Nigerians are coming to the US temporarily to study and then return home replete with tech and entrepreneurial skills to pursue their own ventures.
Nigeria has the largest economy in Africa and is also the biggest oil exporter on the continent. But with an economy heavily dependent on revenue from falling oil prices its growth rate slowed in 2015. As a result of this slowdown the government is now looking for ways to diversify the economy and it may not have to look much further than this young, entrepreneurial and highly educated group of people.
Tijani Ogunlende, 29, moved to the US from Nigeria when he was 16 years old, but after 13 years in the US, he decided to move back to Nigeria last year. “I was filling out the extension for my work permit, which I qualified for, and I just thought why am I doing this? It had been this long uphill battle when I had this other place I could go to and get my feet planted professionally and just in life,” he said.
Ogunlende, who is currently waiting for an examination date for his Masters in Web Design and New Media at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, now lives in the Nigerian capital Abuja where he combines his skills in web and graphic design. He says he’s found that his combination of skills is and uncommon mix in Nigeria compared to in the US. Although he says there’s less appreciation for his mix of skills it’s also a less competitive job market than in the US, which he sees as a chance to create opportunities. Recently Ogunlende finished working on data visualization for a government research project. He says data visualization is relatively new in Nigeria and that while he’s encountered resistance to its value, especially from politicians and policy makers, the project allowed him to combine his skills while sharing new ways to add value to information.
Anie Akpe is an entrepreneur in New York City who is helping people is the African diaspora to create opportunities through technological innovation.
Akpe, who left Nigeria with her family in the early 1980s, has a background in finance, but in 2013 she founded her own company. The company, IBOM LLC, offers business education services and consultation to people in the African diaspora community. She says she decided to start the company after she noticed people in the community kept coming to her for advice on how to get started with their ideas.
While Akpe’s work is based in New York, this July she’s organizing a summit for women in technology in Nigeria. Following the event, she plans to bring some of the women to New York so they can take courses at General Assembly, a popular education company that offers data, design and business technology courses, so they can then return to Nigeria with new technical knowledge and an expanded network.
The search for specialized technical knowledge motivates young Nigerians to study abroad according to Onwugbolu Miachal Tochukwu, the national president of the Nigerian Association of Computer Science Students (NACOSS), a professional organization with 250,000 members in West Africa.
“IT has taken over the world and in Nigeria it’s not an exception,” says Tocrukwu “There’s no sector in the country that don’t need IT and that’s why we need young people to go into IT and computer science. So I think that it is one of the hottest courses in the country,” says Tocrukwu.
He says that while there are plenty of computer science programs at the undergraduate level in Nigeria, often students study abroad for graduate degrees to gain specialization. According to a report released by the Institute of International Education, between 2014 and 2015 there was a 20 percent increase in the number of Nigerians coming to study in the US.
Ufure Ukpebor is one of those students. She moved to the US in 2015 to study for a master’s degree in Computer Science at the City University of New York. When she was 21 years old, Ukpebor was the lead on a project to rebuild the online banking platform for the country’s second largest bank, United Bank for Africa. She says the original programmers who built the interface in the early 90s said it couldn’t be done. Now at 23, Ukpebor says she would like to return to Nigeria once she’s finished her degree to focus on solve some of the big issues - such as access to health care, infrastructure and electricity.
“There’s so much room for development in Nigeria especially in computing and technology,” Because everything in Nigeria in terms of technology is kind of new,” said Ukpebor. “And then we have so many problems you know, so the problems are also opportunities to create solutions,” she said.
Ukpebor says that it’s young people in Nigeria who are at the forefront of leading innovation, realizing that they’ll soon be responsible for some of the problems the country faces. “I mean, after the old folk are gone we have to suffer for whatever they did to the economy, because Nigeria should be very rich and developed because of all the natural resources, but somehow our leaders didn’t seem to be able to put that in place,” she said.
