By Abundance Onubogu
For over a decade, Joshua Ajayi helped keep Nigeria’s mobile networks running. These days, from a quiet corner of Nottingham, he is building something different, software that helps the businesses he grew up around finally get a handle on their finances.
Joshua Ajayi is not the kind of person who makes a lot of noise about what he is building.
He shows up to his day job at a UK technology company every morning, writes code for a production platform that processes thousands of live delivery and route events across agricultural depots, and then goes home and writes more code. Different kind of code this time, and for a different kind of problem. One that has been sitting in the back of his mind long before he ever moved to England.
“I grew up watching businesses in Nigeria operate on paper and prayer,” he says, laughing slightly at his own phrasing. “Not because they did not care about doing things properly. Because nobody had built anything affordable enough, or practical enough, for the way they actually work.”
