Trixie noted the unique spirit of Nigerian entrepreneurs, contrasting them with those in developed economies.

According to her, while startups in Silicon Valley innovate out of convenience or ambition, those in Nigeria build solutions born out of necessity, solutions forged in the face of power shortages, currency fluctuations, and infrastructure gaps. 

“In Nigeria, startups innovate to survive. That is why they scale faster and endure longer,” she said. “Survival itself is the foundation of their innovation.”

GITEX NIGERIA, making its first appearance in Lagos, can’t be limited in description as a conference, she noted. With over 650 startups, 100 major tech companies, 200 investors from 40 countries, and the support of the Nigerian government and NITDA, the event is designed to draw the world’s attention to Africa’s largest economy.

Trixie described Lagos as a “mega high-speed testbed for technology,” pointing to its 20 million residents as live beta testers for innovators. “If you can survive Lagos, your product can survive anywhere in the world,” she said. 

She also stressed that unlike many cities that lean on existing infrastructure, Nigerian startups usually build industries from scratch, a fact that has positioned the country at the top in fintech globally, with solutions that inspire entrepreneurs across continents. “In other markets, they adapt from infrastructure. Here, they create the infrastructure itself,” she explained.

Importantly, she cautioned against expecting instant wins. “This is not a sprint, it is a marathon,” she said, noting that most will not walk away with immediate funding. “80 to 90% of startups will fail. That is the harsh truth, but even failure comes with value, lessons, relationships, mentorship, and clarity.”

The biggest wins from GITEX will be the insights entrepreneurs gain by measuring themselves against global companies, pointing to opportunities for product benchmarking, market fit testing, and understanding interoperability with global systems. 

“Whether it’s aligning with Oracle, integrating with Space42 from the UAE, or refining their pitches to match global standards, these are lessons that only exposure at GITEX can provide,” she said.

“Please do not judge the aesthetics of where startups are operating from. Judge the resilience and ingenuity within those environments,” she said.

The EVP also addressed doubts about bringing GITEX to Nigeria. “Why Nigeria? Because we don’t do convenience. We don’t do easy. We are here to provide access to communities that have been underserved for too long,” she asserted, calling on investors and global partners to recognise the sincerity, passion, and ingenuity of Nigerian entrepreneurs.

With Lagos recently ranked as the fastest-growing emerging startup hub in the world, overtaking Mumbai, Bangalore, São Paulo, and Istanbul, Trixie reaffirmed the city’s place as a rising star in the global tech ecosystem. “You didn’t just join the list, you went straight to the top,” she stated

This is not GITEX NIGERIA joining the global ecosystem, it is the global ecosystem turning its attention to Nigeria. “You are not looking outward; the world is coming inward to meet you,” she emphasised.

Entrepreneurs here don’t just contend with the market; they contend with the state itself. Sudden tax reforms, unpredictable import bans and contradictory regulations hit them; the environment is usually more like a minefield than a marketplace. 

The question is no longer whether you can compete with other businesses, but if you can survive policy shocks long enough to compete at all.

The Context & Stakes

The country’s business environment is high-potential but high-risk. Reforms are truly designed to improve revenue, regulate emerging industries, and boost infrastructure. But in practice, the unpredictability of these changes usually destabilises businesses before they can adapt.

With a tax-to-GDP ratio of just 9%, one of the lowest in Africa, the government is having challenges in widening the tax net. The Nigeria Tax Act 2025 introduced a 4% Development Levy on assessable profits, consolidating several existing levies. While aimed at simplifying compliance, such measures often arrive with little transition time, leaving businesses struggling to rework budgets overnight.

This is not a problem unique to big corporations, as small businesses, which form the backbone of Nigeria’s economy, face their own version of this challenge. Those with turnover under ₦100 million are exempt from Companies Income Tax, but exemptions exclude professional service firms, creating uneven relief and distorting competition.

When the rules change faster than you can adapt, even the most promising venture can collapse.

The Four Big Obstacles

a) Ever-Changing Tax Regimes

Tax changes here are not occasional; they’re constant. Beyond the new Development Levy, digital asset taxation is now law. Profits from crypto and virtual assets are taxable under the new framework, but enforcement is still tricky due to valuation gaps and anonymity challenges. 

The speed and frequency of such reforms mean businesses are perpetually in a state of adjustment, burning resources on compliance rather than growth.

b) Lack of Infrastructure

Nigeria’s infrastructure stock stands at just 30% of GDP, far below the World Bank’s benchmark of 70%. This gap, projected to reach $878 billion over the next 26 years, is the reason SMEs spend twice as much producing goods as their peers in better-served economies. 

Unreliable power forces reliance on generators. Overstretched ports and congested roads delay shipments. Even with 35 governors planning to spend ₦17.51 trillion on infrastructure this year (a 54% increase from 2024), execution is still not certain.

c) Regulatory Whiplash

Few sectors illustrate this better than crypto and fintech. In 2021, the CBN banned crypto transactions, but by 2023, the ban was reversed. Now, under the Investments and Securities Act 2025, crypto is recognised as a regulated digital asset under SEC jurisdiction. 

Fintech companies are caught between overlapping oversight from the CBN and SEC, creating compliance confusion that slows innovation and drives some startups underground.

d) Corruption & Rent-Seeking

The UNODC’s 2024 Nigeria Corruption Survey shows over 70% of Nigerians refused to pay a bribe at least once, a sign of commendable resistance. But corruption still ranks among the country’s top three challenges. 

From procurement to licensing, rent-seeking behaviour inflates costs and wastes time. Many entrepreneurs silently admit that bribes remain “the price of getting things done,” even when they affect trust in institutions.

Survival & Growth Strategies

• Diversify Revenue Streams: Relying on a single source of income is dangerous when a policy change can erase it overnight.
• Stay Policy-Aware: Join trade associations, attend policy briefings, and actively monitor regulatory developments. Being caught off-guard is expensive.
• Build Flexible Models: Design operations that can shift quickly, for example, businesses that can toggle between import and local sourcing depending on customs rules.
• Invest in Digital Agility: E-commerce, remote service delivery, and cloud-based operations can help bypass some infrastructure constraints.
• Collaborate for Scale: Partnerships reduce exposure. Shared logistics, pooled procurement, or joint advocacy can soften the blow of policy changes.

An SME owner in Lagos recently told me:

“Every time I hear ‘new policy,’ I don’t think about how it will help. I think about how much it will cost me this time.”

Another, a fintech founder, described the constant pivoting as “building on shifting sand.” The frustration is the unpredictability, not limited to the cost.

Macro Takeaway

In Nigeria, policy is a central player, not just the background noise of business. And for many, it feels less like a referee and more like a competitor.

Scaling through goes beyond market fit; it includes policy resilience. Entrepreneurs need to be as skilled at reading government gazettes as they are at reading balance sheets. The prize for those who adapt is a market with huge potential, and the cost for those who can’t is early extinction.

So, I leave you with this:
If you could design one policy to protect Nigerian entrepreneurs from sudden shocks, what would it be?

Nigeria has a vibrant startup environment with many cutting-edge businesses in a range of industries. Many Nigerian startups have difficulty adopting the cloud for a variety of reasons: Restricted access to dependable internet infrastructure worries about data privacy and security, data sovereignty and residency requirements, and hugely, knowledge gap in the face of inadequate and massive cloud ‘brain drain’.

Having worked as a Cloud Solutions Architect enabling startups globally, I have firsthand experience with the impact cloud technologies have on startups.  For startup entrepreneurs who are developing lean, the cloud is a crucial tool that enables financial intelligence, enhances scalability, and maintains industry leadership. Let’s look at how startup founders might adopt the cloud to their benefit.

A recent Deloitte analysis reveals that startups who employ cloud computing expand 26% faster than those that do not. Also, a recent study reveals cloud users have a 3 time higher likelihood of exceeding sales targets than non-users.

These figures show how crucial cloud technology gets, especially for budding startups, and even with grown digital natives.

The cloud’s potential to cut CAPEX is one of its over-emphasised benefits for startup entrepreneurs. Metered usage per workload per time ensures startups not only thrive but scale their innovation. Beyond CAPEX, finOps is ever critical to cloud cost optimisation.

Cost optimisation is the top cloud initiative up until 2021 for the 5th year in a row* as 61% or organisations plan to optimise cost use of cloud with a whooping USD10M waste on unnecessary cloud spend.

Monetisation and time to value can both be enhanced via the cloud. Startups can easily create new environments for testing, development, and deployment using cloud-based tools and services. A quick win here is monetising quickly through API solutions, commercialising data, paid embedded solutions to customer apps etc.

Funding gets easier too. Cloud marketplace and extended partnerships, especially with public cloud giants like Google, provide a quick springboard to global visibility, support from the best hands in the world and even funding.

Cybersecurity, a board-level bug, has become better in the cloud.  We have moved from the days when CISO’s question the security, privacy, and compliance of the cloud to a dawn of automated detection and response to emerging threats, vulnerabilities, and malignant cybersecurity issues.

Google’s Autonomic Security Operations for instance, provides a stack of products, blueprints, accelerator programmes, technical content, that has transited cloud security from shared responsibility to shared fate.  Security does not have to be a nightmare!

Reliability is another emergent benefit.  A recent research ended up with: reliability is everything.  Clients and/or customers would move on with the next vendor if services do not meet user expectations.  The cloud re-defined this and provides the right SLA’s, SLO’s etc. per service without unnecessary spend. SLO-based monitoring and automated response is the order of day now with cloud services.

Performance ties to reliability in some sort of way.  If services are not performant, then their reliability is doubtful.  Performance, on the other hand, has to be measurable and empirical.

The startup innovator most times, has to leverage bits of solutions (in modules) that can be sold in bits or in whole.  This is the brain behind microservices which ensures the blast radius of a performance, security, etc., bottleneck is not as holistic as the old-school monoliths.  The cloud fosters microservice architectures, multi-tenant designs etc.

In spite of the fact that these advantages are there, legislative demands like data residency affect cloud adoption in Nigeria.  This is so as many cloud giants – do not have datacenters located in-country.

A hybrid cloud architecture in this case becomes handy where tiers of the startup’s solution stack are distributed on-prem, leased datacenters and/or on extended cloud-type services while other tiers sit on the public cloud.

Understanding the decision pillars above is great for a start.  Moreso, please follow us on LinkedIn, #techie, to join a free online community of global experts providing cloud best practices and monthly digital transformation events leveraging the cloud. Uche is also one of the founding members of Cloud Techie – a digital community that helps businesses grow using the cloud.

About the author – Uche Nwaukwa is a DevOps, SRE, and Senior Cloud Architect with 15+ years of experience having played strategic roles in global fintech, banks, ISVs, telecommunications, and OEMs including IBM, Microsoft and Google. He has been privileged to advise execs and techies alike on architecture best practices in the financial services industry, dominantly.  He has served as an Enterprise Architect and also, a CTO driving bespoke architectures to meet stringent SLOs and SLAs. Uche is an avid learner, a father, and a husband, and likes to relax with a good chess game and cycling.

*Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report.