- About us
About Badagry Tech Summit
- why badagry
Nigeria's firsts happened here.
Badagry is not simply old. It is the specific place where a run of national firsts happened, and most Nigerians learned at least one of them in school.
1842 — the first Christian sermon preached in Nigeria, and the first Christmas, under the Agia tree.
1843 — Nigeria’s first primary school, later St Thomas’ Anglican.
1845 — Nigeria’s first storey building, put up by the Church Missionary Society. It is still standing.
We looked for any technology summit, conference or hackathon held in Badagry between 2023 and 2026. There wasn’t one. Every result was Ikeja, Yaba, Victoria Island, Gbagada or Ikorodu.
So this is the first technology summit ever held in Badagry. That isn’t a boast we invented. It’s a pattern this town already owns.
- the gap
Lagos has the ecosystem. Badagry has none of it.
Lagos has the biggest tech ecosystem in Africa. Badagry has none of it. Not because the talent isn’t here. It is. We’ve taught in more than a hundred schools across this division and we’ve seen it.
What’s missing is the room: the place where a student meets a founder, a founder meets an investor, and a company finds people it would never have found on LinkedIn.
You can’t get a job from a place you’ve never been. You can’t pitch a room you can’t enter.
- Who's behind it
Tech Now Global
Tech Now Global is a youth-led non-profit founded in Badagry in 2020 by David Onilude and Kazeem Quadri. It started as a digital literacy class for 300 people.
Six years on it has reached more than 30,000 young people in 100+ schools across 32 communities, through the Digital Literacy School Tours, SkillUp Eko, the Ashoka CTEACH Bootcamp, the Tech Immersion Program, BUILD (our innovation programme inside Badagry Division secondary schools) and Anfani, the platform that matches young people to scholarships, internships and fellowships.
We’ve been here the whole time. This summit is the room we always wanted to build.
young people reached
schools across 32 communities
people in our first digital literacy class
of consistent work in Badagry
- the founder
The person behind it.
David Onilude grew up in Badagry West, in a house without electricity, and finished secondary school at sixteen. He studied at LAUTECH.
In the 2020 lockdown he saw that young people in his own community had no way to learn basic computer skills. So he ran a class. Three hundred enrolled; two hundred and thirty finished. That class became Tech Now Global.
Six years on he is an engineer of eight years, co-founder of Beere Software, and the builder behind Anfani, which now matches more than a thousand young people to scholarships, internships and fellowships. He is a Diana Award recipient, an Ashoka Young Changemaker and a Teen Vogue 21 Under 21 honoree.
He is not the story. The students are. He is the proof that it can start here.
Real outcomes for real people
01.
Students leave with something they can use on Monday: a contact, an application, a skill.
02.
Builders leave with feedback from people who’ve shipped things.
03.
Founders leave with introductions, not just a badge.
04.
Companies leave with a shortlist of people nobody else has met.
05.
Badagry gets a date on the tech calendar it didn’t have before.