We’ve just completed the first draft of Nigerian entrepreneur Tayo Oviosu’s profile for How we made it in Africa: The book, and it is truly mandatory reading for anyone interested in building a business on the continent.
The golden coastline of California wasn’t enough to keep Oviosu from returning to Nigeria to found Paga – a secure payment system that has become one of the country’s most widely used platforms, currently with nine million users.
Built on the principle of “appropriate technology” able to operate in any environment and on the most basic mobile phone, Paga addresses an issue that is critical to Africa’s development: the availability of financial services to all.
“The opportunity I saw is one that exists across the continent,” said Oviosu in a previous interview. “Traditional banks don’t have the reach to the mass market and so these economies are inevitably cash driven, and it’s difficult to make payments and effect commerce. So if Nigeria is to be the economic juggernaut it really could be, you have to solve payments and make it easy for people to pay or get paid; and it has to be easy for people to access finance.”
Oviosu is one of the 25 business people featured in How we made it in Africa: The book, which tells the stories of entrepreneurs who've built thriving ventures. The ebook launched on 15 October 2018.