The two-day conference, themed “The Big Bold Step,” brought together telecoms operators, global technology firms, startups, investors, students and public-sector leaders at Landmark Event Centre to discuss what it will take for Africa to stop lagging and start building platforms of its own.

From keynote sessions to fireside chats and product showcases, the conference stressed that the limitations initially preventing African companies from competing at scale are fading away, but hesitation remains highly expensive.

Glory Olamigoke, co-founder and co-convener of Tech Revolution Africa, said the conference was designed to close a persistent gap in the ecosystem.

“We are trying to solve a number of problems and close a number of gaps, but perhaps the most critical one is bridging the gap between the early stage innovators, builders, founders in the ecosystem and the leaders in the space,” he said.

Unlike typical industry gatherings, Olamigoke said the event was intentionally structured to bring founders and decision-makers into the same room, while also extending its reach beyond established stakeholders.

“We are going all the way down to the secondary schools, the primary schools, because we believe that if we can start to culture these young ones, then we will be able to influence the next generation,” he said, pointing to the student tech debates introduced at this year’s edition.

That emphasis on long-term capacity building was reiterated through the day’s conversations, including a fireside chat with the Federal Government, represented by Lagos State Commissioner for Innovation, Science and Technology, Olatunbosun Alake.

Drawing from Nigeria’s reputation challenges abroad, Alake said that while technology is important, Africa’s potential cannot be realised without addressing surrounding challenges, including Nigeria’s image abroad.

“It’s not a technology conversation,” he said. “It’s a conversation that is at the very bottom of the motivation behind everything.”

He urged young professionals to engage the public sector rather than avoid it, describing the work as difficult but impactful. “By all means, do that, because you will have an impact, but make sure that your principles and your values remain strong,” he said.

MTN Nigeria’s keynote on the digital economy forecast for 2026, delivered by its Chief Information Officer, Shoyinka Shodunke, went beyond a focus on growth projections. 

Shodunke traced Africa’s marginal role across previous industrial revolutions and warned that the fourth leaves little room for delay.

“The inputs today are data, and where’s the factory? The factory sits in the cloud,” he said, adding that talent is no longer bound by geography and computing power no longer requires heavy capital outlay.

He pointed to cloud subscriptions available “at $50” compared to six-figure infrastructure costs in the past, arguing that scale is now accessible to startups and enterprises alike. But he warned that comfort with legacy revenue streams could still hold organisations back.

“You cannot live with a legacy mindset, a fear of disruption, or the comfort of mediocrity,” Shodunke said.

Using MTN as a case study, he explained how the telecoms giant has had to intentionally disrupt itself, moving beyond voice and data into cloud services, fintech and intelligent platforms layered on top of its network infrastructure.

The focus on infrastructure continued during MTN’s product showcase, where Onome Ologe and Tobechukwu Ajoku outlined the company’s local cloud services, emphasising data residency, naira-based pricing and predictable operating costs for Nigerian businesses.

“If you’re a CFO or a founder and you need to know cost accountability, you can go to sleep,” Ajoku said, noting that pricing remains stable regardless of foreign exchange volatility.

From infrastructure, the conversation at Tech Revolution Africa 2.0 moved into data and artificial intelligence during a presentation by Ligadata’s Mike Penner, who revealed the scale of its partnership with MTN Nigeria’s data operations.

“We now are running at 1.2 trillion pet records, 1.4 million records per second,” Penner said, describing a system designed to turn fragmented enterprise data into real-time, actionable intelligence.

“What we’ve done over the past few years at MTN together is something extraordinary,” he said, adding that the goal was not experimentation but measurable value creation.

Penner noted that African enterprises must treat data and knowledge as sovereign assets, warning against outsourcing intelligence without understanding what drives it.

That theme of sovereignty and control resurfaced during a panel on open innovation and hybrid platforms featuring executives from Red Hat and Redington. 

Speakers explained that open-source software and hybrid cloud models offer African companies flexibility without locking them into single platforms or geographies.

“Open source is driving innovation.” It is a condition of innovation, particularly for startups seeking speed without prohibitive expenses.

During a fireside chat on Global Tech & the African Market, Soji Maurice-Diya, CEO of ntel (NatCom), emphasized the need for Africa to focus on solving its own problems rather than simply chasing global trends.

He said, “Nobody’s going to solve our problems for us. Yes, we need global access, we need all the technology that’s available, taper all of the solutions and build our own solutions.”

Maurice-Diya added that African companies should prioritise innovation that addresses local challenges, ensuring technology creates measurable impact rather than just replicating global models.

Equinix’s Ayomide Jones, EMEA Business Development, West Africa, also spoke on the role of interconnection in Africa’s digital growth. She highlighted how networks, content and cloud providers work together to enhance modern businesses. 

“Everything we use nowadays to solve our problems is content. This is only possible because of interconnection,” Jones said. 

She explained that Equinix’s data centres in Lagos and across Africa enable startups and enterprises to connect to cloud services, financial systems, and global platforms without heavy upfront investment, creating the infrastructure that allows African businesses to scale quickly.

For all the talk of opportunity, speakers repeatedly returned to execution as the differentiator. “We always talk, so now, let’s go back and execute,” Olamigoke said.

Day Two of Tech Revolution Africa Conference 2.0 continues on Saturday, with further sessions on policy, investment, emerging technologies and the role of African enterprises in strengthening the continent’s digital economy.

While 80% of side hustlers say they just want to earn more, others are driven by a deeper urge of freedom, ownership, and the chance to create on their own terms. 

Nonetheless, only 34% of job seekers in tech actively work on side projects, despite the fact that hiring managers are scanning portfolios and GitHub pages before they even look at your CV.

In our Macro Monday discussion today, we’re not recycling vague advice. These are practical, field-tested projects people are using right now to build wealth, gain skills, and land roles. Smart work that pays off.

Project Categories at a Glance

To make it easier, we’ve grouped these into four core types:

• Build Something Useful – Tools, products, or platforms
• Create & Share Content – Blogs, tutorials, newsletters
• Offer a Service – Freelance, contract, consulting
• Use Smart Tools – AI-powered or automated hacks

You don’t need to pick one lane. In fact, over 50% of side hustlers juggle three or more projects. Let’s dive in.

10 Side Projects Worth Your Time

1. Build a Chrome Extension That Solves One Frustrating Problem

What it is: Identify a pain point (e.g. LinkedIn limits, auto-refresh for crypto trackers), then create a small extension that fixes it.
Monetisation: Offer a free version, then upsell features.
Real example: Many developers have built Chrome tools that now passively earn them hundreds monthly via Gumroad.
Start here: Learn the basic Chrome APIs, use JavaScript, and publish to the Web Store.

2. Turn Your Resume into a One-Page Portfolio Site

What it is: Convert your CV into a personal webpage showcasing work, skills, links, and testimonials.
Job impact: Instant credibility. Recruiters Google you; give them something to find.
Visibility: Include GitHub links, project demos, or blog posts.
Start here: Use templates from tools like Framer or Notion, or host a static site via GitHub Pages.

3. Write a Weekly Newsletter in Your Niche

What it is: Share insights, curations, or experiments in tech, design, or writing.
Monetisation: After building a subscriber base, offer sponsorships or premium content.
Job angle: Writing forces clarity and attracts employers who care about communication.
Start here: Substack, Beehiiv, or even LinkedIn Newsletters.

4. Contribute to an Open Source Project

What it is: Improve, document, or bug-fix public codebases.
Credibility: Shows team skills, code quality, and real-world impact.
Networking: Maintainers and contributors often refer each other for jobs.
Start here: Use GitHub’s “Good First Issue” label to onboard quickly.

5. Build and Sell Notion or Figma Templates

What it is: Create digital templates people can use for productivity, design, or content planning.
Income: List them on marketplaces or your own site. Some sellers earn $500–$2,000/month.
No code needed: Just good design thinking and problem solving.
Start here: Browse the most downloaded templates, then create your own twist.

6. Join and Win a Hackathon (Even a Virtual One)

What it is: Build a product or prototype over a few days with a team or solo.
Value: Recognition, cash prizes, and sometimes direct job offers.
Resume boost: Demonstrates speed, collaboration, and initiative.
Start here: Sites like Devpost, MLH, and AngelHack list ongoing events globally.

7. Start a Micro SaaS That Solves a Niche Problem

What it is: A simple subscription-based tool built for a narrow audience.
Earnings: Many devs earn $1k–$5k/month from solo tools.
Scalability: Low overhead, high leverage.
Start here: Solve a workflow issue in your industry. Build in public for feedback.

8. Create an Open Source API Wrapper

What it is: Wrap a complex or poorly documented API (e.g. government data, crypto, niche SaaS) into something easier to use.
Impact: Developers appreciate great wrappers—your repo might go viral.
Job bonus: Shows backend and API fluency, which hiring managers love.
Start here: Pick an API, write the wrapper, document it clearly, and share.

9. Design and Sell Developer-Themed Merchandise

What it is: Funny t-shirts, coding mugs, niche stickers, even physical zines.
Earnings: Print-on-demand means zero upfront costs.
Branding: Build a small community and turn it into a brand.
Start here: Use Teespring or Redbubble, promote on Reddit or Dev.to.

10. Launch a Free Tool That Solves a Micro-Pain

What it is: A tiny website, calculator, or widget that does one thing well.
Why it works: Low barrier to build, high value if done right.
Examples: Colour palette generators, Markdown previewers, habit trackers.
Start here: Identify what you Google for regularly, then build it yourself.

Bonus: Stack Your Side Projects

One side project can turn into a whole ecosystem. Your Chrome extension gets you newsletter subscribers. Your newsletter feeds into your micro SaaS. Your micro SaaS becomes your main income.

This is how people are building tech careers that don’t depend entirely on job boards or HR filters. It’s all about creating your own momentum.

Just Start

Most people overthink this. You don’t need VC funding or perfect skills. You just need to start.

In 2025, spending 11–16 hours per week on a side project can translate into $16–23/hour or even more over time. For those of us in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, where online gig work is becoming more common, this isn’t just a trend, it’s a strategy and a growth path to thrive.

Choose one idea. Build fast. Ship often. You never know which project will open the next door.

Which of these projects are you most likely to start? Hit reply, comment, or share it with someone who’s stuck. Your future job, or income stream, might be waiting on the other side of a weekend build.

To combat this, automotive leaders are working to modernise and standardise practices in order to bring customers the latest and greatest in features and services while designing for functional safety.

As a result, automakers are shifting into high gear as they engage open source communities and organisations like Red Hat to bring greater flexibility, customer engagement and increased innovation to their vehicle designs.

Adopting universal open source software, such as Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System, can help automakers integrate software defined vehicles technologies into their line up more quickly than ever before.

Earlier this year, Red Hat announced a collaboration with General Motors to redefine the transportation landscape with a continuous functional-safety certified, Linux-based in-vehicle operating system. This helped set the stage for the use cases that will shape the collective automotive industry’s future.

This was just the first step of our journey; Red Hat also works with Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to develop and help deliver functional-safety certified systems built on Linux to support mission critical applications for automakers.

With this step, Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System will be integrated with and tested on the Snapdragon Digital Chassis–a set of cloud-connected platforms for telematics and connectivity, digital cockpit and advanced driver assistance.

By working together, Red Hat and Qualcomm Technologies can offer automakers the benefit of improved methodologies and processes to accelerate innovation at reduced costs.

The current state where automotive SoC vendors maintain private branches for Board Support Packages (BSPs), leaves automakers with a challenging support and maintenance problem.

 It takes a lot of resources and effort to keep SoC support current as the underlying operating system evolves.  By committing to fully leverage the open source approach, employing an “upstream first” philosophy and limiting out of tree elements in board and device support, the goal of long lived support and continued feature innovation as the underlying open source baseline evolves can be realised.

While rapid transformation doesn’t happen overnight, collaborative work like this within our ecosystem of customers and partners is crucial to building, testing, and certifying Linux-based automotive systems.

With better, increased automation for safety certification steps, re-certification–which has often been a bottleneck within the industry– can occur in a fraction of the typically required time.

This is how Red Hat is helping drive automakers forward–by not only providing open technologies, but by helping the automotive world understand, adapt to and embrace open source concepts for the benefits of the whole ecosystem and end customers.

So says Quintin Brussow, Red Hat Development Lead at hybrid IT systems integrator and managed services provider, Datacentrix, who explains that while many businesses have moved onto an open hybrid cloud model within the past few years, as requirements escalated during the pandemic, we’re still seeing huge open source adoption outside these specific challenges.

Red Hat report confirms growing importance of open source

In fact, ninety-five percent of respondents in Red Hat’s ‘The State of Enterprise Open Source’ report said that enterprise open source is important to their organisation’s overall enterprise infrastructure because of the innovation and agility the model makes possible.

“The beauty of open source is that it not only caters for the swift deployment of applications by businesses, its community-driven nature ensures that it is in a process of constant innovation, thus making it more agile and also providing multiple ways to solve challenges.

“Right now, we’re seeing a big drive for companies to adopt an open hybrid cloud model. Linux can and does run everywhere, and many cloud computing and always-on services have been built using an open source model. It’s safe to say that the majority of larger South African enterprises – like telcos, financial services organisations and insurance companies for example – are already running enterprise Linux either on premise or in the cloud.”

Furthermore, adds Brussow, there has been increasing adoption of a DevOps culture within South African business, and more local enterprises are investigating the use of containers and Kubernetes to deliver apps to market faster.

This is in line with Red Hat’s report, which states that ‘Containers, Kubernetes for the associated container orchestration, and the vast number of complementary cloud-native open source projects may be the best examples of new categories of software. Seventy percent of IT leaders we surveyed work for organisations that use Kubernetes and almost a third plan to significantly increase their use of containers over the next 12 months.’

“There is a serious focus on AI and machine learning across all industries, and the use of enterprise open source is playing an important role in these new emerging technology workloads. This is true also of edge and IoT computing, where significant effort is being put in to enhance enterprise open source capabilities and insights, enabling faster results.

“Here in particular, we’re seeing containerisation being brought to the edge, something that would have seemed unimaginable even two years ago.

“Finally, open source solutions are being used for new and innovative ways to use data for operational reporting and advanced analytics, for example a data lake architecture.”

Benefits of open source

According to Brussow, there are four main benefits to using open source today:

1. Flexibility: Developers are able to see how the code works and can make changes for their needs as required.

2. Agility:  Every business requires agility and open source delivers just that, offering multiple ways to attack and solve a problem.

3. Security:  While open source’s community-based nature means that many people are contributing to the code, it also means that more people are inspecting it too, identifying vulnerabilities faster and pushing out more regular updates.

4. Community: Open source communities and contributors make a good case for the efficiencies of team collaboration. The code is available, and developers make suggestions.

This type of approach cannot be matched by proprietary software companies, where there is a process for customisation requests that could take time to execute and will definitely have a cost attached.

“There are not many instances where open source can’t be used. What is important to specify though – particularly it comes to mission-critical apps – is that businesses wanting to ensure that the right certifications, support and security measures are in place should make enterprise open source software best practice across the board. And this is where enterprise open source companies, like Red Hat and Cloudera, play an important role.

“The future for open-source software is undeniably bright – we could even say that it forms the backbone of today’s technology infrastructure – and it will continue to change the face of technology,” he concludes.

Open source is also driving innovation in emerging technological fields such as artificial intelligence, automation, virtual reality, quantum computing, IoT, and edge computing.

And because no single organisation can solve the world’s greatest challenges alone, especially considering the pace and complexity of today’s technological advances, the open source model fosters collaboration across global communities to bring the best ideas forward from anyone – to the benefit of everyone.

Today, 90% of global IT leaders have embraced using enterprise open source software to solve problems and reach the forefront of innovation in an increasingly complex and connected world. This includes some of the largest governments, banks, institutions, scientific organisations, and enterprises. But not everyone has always believed that open source is a viable way of developing commercial software.

These are some of the historical moments that I believe led to the era of open source innovation we are in today.

Looking back

One of the first examples of openly sharing technological innovation happened in 1911 when Henry Ford appealed the Selden Patent for a proprietary two-cylinder engine design. When Ford won the lawsuit, the free sharing of patents not only became widespread in the industry but also fundamentally changed the world in the early 20th century.

We are still benefiting from that collaboration, since open source technology is now standard in the automotive industry and continues to play a critical role in today’s generation of electric, hybrid, and smart cars.

Open collaboration then carried over to the 1950s when software development was still in its infancy. In 1953, a tool developed for electronic computers at the UNIVAC division for Remington Rand was released to customers with its source code.

Customers were encouraged to report bugs and recommend improvements to the company. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) became one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol and enabled a simpler exchange of software code – which also led to the birth of the internet.

At the same time, a general shift towards proprietary software began. Believing it would increase profitability, organisations began developing software in siloes to protect copyrights and issue licensing fees.

Innovation across the industry became more isolated and stagnant, but this was soon followed by the rise of the free software movement.

The GNU Project was launched in 1983 and created a complete operating system with free licenses and an open use policy. In 1991, Linus Torvalds inadvertently changed the world when the GNU tools were combined with his Linux kernel to create the first fully open source operating system.

A giant leap for enterprise

Red Hat Linux released its first non-beta version in May 1995, with the aim to offer the innovation of the Linux operating system to more users.

Large organisations also saw this as a solution to their innovation needs, but Linux needed more enterprise features to make it a viable option.

Open source enterprise solutions were introduced to bridge this gap.

Many of our early customers, users, and contributors were financial institutions, such as Morgan Stanley, which migrated from Unix to Linux in 2001, and were soon followed by many more. As more organisations in the highly regulated – and arguably conservative – financial sector began migrating, the world began to realise that enterprise open source solutions were safe, secure, and scalable.

Fast forward to 2021, and we have global FinTech leaders like NTT DATA using open source technology to modernise Japan’s financial services sector.

Recently, they have implemented open source hybrid cloud and automation technologies to build a modern cloud service infrastructure, allowing teams to develop, deploy, and automate new applications for banking customers and greatly improve customer service.

And they are not the only ones – Open Banking has become a paradigm shift in the industry, allowing both financial institutions and customers to benefit from a more collaborative ecosystem.

Moving to the cloud and beyond

The next big acceleration of open source technology happened with the biggest wave in computing since the internet: the cloud.

Open source Linux provided a consistent foundation for early cloud platforms, and by 2017, 90% of the global cloud workload was run on Linux.

Most containers being used today are also Linux containers, which has enabled containerised applications to be developed and moved across different cloud and on-premise environments.

Ten years ago, we declared the open hybrid cloud as our vision, and this has become a reality. Today, the open source approach gives organisations the much-needed flexibility to run applications in a variety of environments, based on the requirements of each workload, while maintaining consistent security, policies, and development environments. The future of cloud is not only open, but also hybrid.

The open source way

Open source software has helped businesses across all industries develop and deploy innovative new services. It has broken down the siloes that inhibit innovation and allowed companies to share in their success.

The open source way is also about more than just software – it’s a change in mindset. Through collaboration, meritocracy, transparency, and the support of a diverse community, open source developers are building a better world with better software.

And while open source has doubtlessly shaped many aspects of the digital world we live in today, there will be even greater things yet to come.