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In 2018, Tayo Aina boarded a plane headed to Russia for the FIFA World Cup without a visa. He did not watch football, but his friends planned to watch the tournament live, so he took the opportunity to leave Africa for the first time. With about *₦300,000 ($$831.06) gathered from his filmmaking side gigs, he bought a return flight ticket and landed in Moscow in the middle of June. The Russian parliament had just approved a bill make the country visa-free throughout the World Cup. To qualify, all visitors needed to do was buy a flight ticket, which granted them a FAN ID that served as a permit to fly into Russia. That trip was the beginning of a new kind of hunger for Aina. “It was a lot of exposure,” he said, realising life was different from what he had known. “Life doesn’t have to be the way it was in Lagos—people can live differently.” In the month he had toured Moscow, watched football matches, and taken midnight walks without fear, Aina decided, he would see the rest of Africa. “[I realised,] if I could go back to Africa, then I could travel more,” he said. “Let me go across Africa, too, [and see] what Africa is like.” This is the story of Tayo Aina, YouTube creator, filmmaker, and tech founder. Aina had spent time working within the tech space before ever transitioning into the media. Before he ventured into travel and film production, he was building Spacebook, an app to book a space for events, meetings, and vacations, which he intended to be the ‘Airbnb of Africa.’ He soon realised that Spacebook was not viable, and coming off a tech career pathway, later worked as an Uber driver in Lagos in 2017, which allowed him to see places he ordinarily would not. In between rides, he would watch YouTube videos that exposed him to international creators documenting other cities. As an Uber rider, driving customers to restaurants and diverse locations, he began documenting places to visit with the phone he had at the time, then uploading them to YouTube. Eventually, Aina rented equipment to film weddings, events, and construction sites privately for clients. It was not until April 2018, when an international music star, J Cole, visited Nigeria, and Aina offered his team free video coverage in exchange for a ticket to his concert, that he realised the impact he could make with the videos he created. In under 48 hours, Aina edited the video of the performance surrounded by a crowd pulsing with energy, and uploaded it to his YouTube channel, garnering him a million views at the time. As Aina created videos, he began to recognise the power of the stories he told, revealing Lagos and Nigeria in ways his audience and the curious public did not seem to have experienced. “I started to see comments of people saying, ‘I’ve never seen Nigeria like this, or Lagos like this before, or now I have something to show my friends in the US or UK,” he recalled. It became obvious that he wasn’t just making videos but telling powerful stories that were changing perceptions. From his observation, the people commonly documenting the stories of African were non-Africans, and while it was ‘cool to watch,’ nuances and context were different, and sometimes missing. Aina is clear about why the African perspective matters, whether home or abroad: “A white person who lives in New York, their lifestyle and their perception are different from someone who grew up in Nigeria, moved to New York and is now living there. And I felt like nobody was capturing that.” How a global lockdown birthed the ‘Made in Africa’ series After Aina’s trip to watch the World Cup in Moscow, he returned more resolute to document the rest of Africa beyond Nigeria’s borders. “That’s how it started,” he admitted. “It became a bigger vision of ‘let me showcase Africa’.” Aina did not make his next international trip till a year after when he visited Kenya; all the while, he continued to upload videos on YouTube and create content for private clients. In February 2020, he planned a one-month visit to South Africa. While in the country, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the country, rolling with vineyards and wine tasting cellars, came to a standstill. The lockdown extended Tayo’s one-month visit to an eight-month stay. It was here that his lens started to take a different subject. “I felt that as I’m promoting culture[s], and tourism,” he said. “ I also want to promote the people because I know how hard it is to build a business, and black people, Africans need as much support as they can get.” With the lockdown, Aina had ample time. When his friend mentioned his mechanic, a Yoruba man from Nigeria with a story worth telling, Aina grabbed his camera and went off to the workshop. In the midst of metal drilling, soapy bonnets and polished car trunks, the ‘Made in Africa’ series was born. “Those are conversations that I would normally have without the camera,” Aina said. “It was me sharing that interest, bringing it onto a camera and making it, in a way, a lot of people can learn from how others build their businesses.” Aina returned to Nigeria in October, but not before gaining his first 100,000 subscribers while in South Africa. Later that year, YouTube monetised his channel. It took a while to access his funds because of the logistics around receiving his AdSense PIN, but eventually, he did and received his first payout in 2021. As he continued to travel, telling stories of cultures and the people behind them, Aina started to get enquiries about creating videos and growing a successful YouTube channel. “I always wished there was somebody who could take me through the process of how to grow a YouTube channel… but I never found that,” he said. Driven by a desire to distil years of trial, error and growth
Read MoreEvery day for a month, Praise Olaoluwa showed up at Eko market, the cluster of Balogun and Idumota markets on Lagos Island, one of Nigeria’s commercial hubs. Not to sell anything. Not to pitch anyone. Just to be there – to eat lunch with the traders, share dinner, celebrate birthdays, buy a bottle of whisky when someone added another year. He was trying to understand how these businesses breathed: how they bought, how they sold, and how money moved through their hands each day. Then he noticed something. Every time he showed up, someone asked the same question, almost jokingly: “Have you come with money for us?” It happened once. Then again. And again. Different traders, the same question. “It didn’t happen once. It didn’t happen twice,” Olaoluwa says. “There were different people who were asking. Have you brought money for us to do business?” That was the moment everything clicked. Sharesell, the inventory-backed operating system for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) that he had been building and rebuilding since 2022, finally had its answer. Day 1: A marketplace nobody needed Sharesell did not start as a lending company. It started as a marketplace. The idea emerged from observing a business model that had quietly gone mainstream in Nigeria: WhatsApp vendors. After WhatsApp launched its Status feature in 2017, informal sellers turned it into a 24-hour shopfront, posting products for a 24-hour shopfront and fielding orders through direct messages. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With people stuck at home and searching for income, selling on WhatsApp became one of the lowest-friction options available. Behind the scenes, however, the supply chain was chaotic. A buyer places an order. The vendor calls the supplier to check if the item exists. The supplier ships to the vendor. The vendor ships to the buyer. No tracking. No visibility. Constant delays. “The whole process was fragmented,” Olaoluwa says. He built a marketplace to fix it: a platform connecting suppliers with resellers. Vendors could select a product, add their margin, share it on social media, and let Sharesell handle payment, settlement, and delivery. It was clean, simple, and logical – at least Olaoluwa thought so. The only problem was that the vendors didn’t think they had a problem. “They were okay with having to reach out manually to suppliers by themselves,” he says. “They were even okay going into the markets to buy items and resell.” What Sharesell had built was, in his words, a vitamin — useful, but not urgent. Nobody wakes up in pain for a vitamin. Day 500: Going back to the drawing board, twice After the first version stalled, Olaoluwa and his co-founder, Osamudiamen Imasuen– a childhood friend of over 20 years who initially joined to design the UI before becoming co-founder – shifted focus to the suppliers. If the resellers did not feel the pain, maybe the suppliers did. They rebuilt the platform for merchants: importers and major distributors operating in markets like Eko. They offered shopfronts, logistics tools, and inventory management systems. The suppliers engaged with it. But engagement wasn’t retention. “They didn’t come back to it as they should have,” Olaoluwa says. Inventory systems only work if updated regularly. Miss a week or a month, and the data becomes unreliable. The habit breaks. Part of the problem was cultural. These were businesses that had kept sales books by hand for decades. Convincing them to digitise was not just a product problem; it was a behaviour change problem. “You can maybe penetrate, but the resistance is going to remain there whether you like it or not,” he says. That’s when Olaoluwa put down his laptop and went to the market himself, every day, for a month. What he found there changed everything. The suppliers weren’t struggling with inventory software. They were struggling with cash. Banks asked for collateral they didn’t have, and the loan terms didn’t match their sales cycles. Traditional banking was built for corporate-style businesses and had largely left them out. “These guys, while the need was valid, were marginalised,” he says. Sharesell became a lending company. It took nine months of conversations to close the first credit partner. When Sharesell did, they secured a $4 million line of credit. Within the first week of launching Pulse — their lending product — over 400 businesses had qualified for loans. “The demand was more than the supply we had at that point,” Olaoluwa says. But they had learned one critical lesson early: don’t give cash. When some of these business owners received money directly, it had a tendency to go toward other things — a renovation, a second wife, urgent family needs. Instead, Sharesell collateralises each loan against the inventory or asset it’s purchasing. A business submits what they need. Sharesell buys it on their behalf and delivers it. The loan is secured against something real, and if repayment fails, the inventory can be recovered and resold. That insight—financing tied to goods, not cash—is the spine of what Sharesell is today. Day 1000: Distribution is everything Sharesell is now a team of 10, split between Lagos and Kaduna, where the engineering team is based. Olaoluwa shuttles between both but stays closer to Lagos because that’s where the suppliers are, where the partners are, and where the deals get done. “You can’t sit in Kaduna and be doing business in Lagos,” he says. The company is bootstrapped, initially funded by the founders’ savings and crypto gains from 2018 to 2020, and later topped up by an undisclosed friends-and-family round. External fundraising has been on the radar since 2023, but when the funding climate turned cold, they made a deliberate decision: build toward profitability first. “I’m trying to optimise for productivity,” Olaoluwa says, “rather than for raising.” That same shift in thinking has changed how Olaoluwa leads. In the early days, he and his co-founder were obsessed with the product — building, iterating, shipping. The market was secondary. “We didn’t engage the market early enough to be sure this is
Read MoreWomandla Foundation, a South African upskilling non-profit, has partnered with the International Association of Volunteer Effort and IBM SkillsBuild to launch Phase Two of Reskilling Revolution Africa in South Africa. The initiative aims to equip women and young people with future-ready skills as automation continues to reshape entry-level work. The International Association of Volunteer Effort is a global network that promotes volunteering for social change, while IBM SkillsBuild is a free digital learning platform. “At IBM, we believe that access to technology skills is a catalyst for inclusive economic growth,” John Matogo, corporate social responsibility leader for IBM Middle East and Africa, said at the launch on Thursday. Reskilling Revolution Africa, endorsed by the African Union in 2023, piloted its first phase from late 2024 in Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa, reaching about 30,000 young people. Participants enrol through local NGOs, complete curated learning pathways on IBM SkillsBuild, spanning digital literacy, AI, cybersecurity, entrepreneurship and soft skills, and earn globally recognised certificates. The model combines self-paced online courses with mentorship, volunteering and community projects to build practical experience and employability. Phase Two, now being rolled out in South Africa by the Womandla Foundation, expands course offerings such as AI and green skills. Cohorts run 8–10 weeks with mentoring and post-training support to translate credentials into jobs, entrepreneurship or further study. South Africa’s youth unemployment rate for ages 15–24 sits near 59%, one of the highest globally. While job losses in South Africa linked to AI and automation are still only estimates, the reality is that some workers are being laid off, and freelancers are struggling to find new work. It is difficult to tell whether these retrenchments are driven by AI, cost-cutting, or offshoring, since current studies do not clearly isolate the causes in the South African context. But in the US, white-collar automation layoffs surged in 2025, a trend expected to diffuse globally and could soon intensify South Africa’s employment challenges. South Africa faces heightened risk in sectors such as business‑process outsourcing (BPO) and call centres, where automation technologies are advancing quickly, but human labour still carries much of the workload. As these global trends take hold, the country is under growing pressure to plan strategically, finding ways to safeguard its workforce and prepare for the disruptions ahead. “We should pay less attention to predicting job loss numbers and focus more on building adaptive learning ecosystems fast enough to keep up with technological change,” Sam Gqomo, the founder of Womandla Foundation, said. She said the foundation offers about 36 free learning paths in entrepreneurship, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and creative industries, from beginner to advanced. “This collaboration demonstrates what becomes possible when technology, volunteering and purpose-driven partnerships align,” said Samuel Turay, Africa Senior Program Manager from IAVE. “Together, we are creating practical pathways that empower people to participate meaningfully in the economy.” Khadija Richards, head of impact at Womandla, described the AI transition as less of a threat than a structural turning point for Africa’s labour market. “Africa is the youngest continent in the world,” she said. “ Young people are already digitally adaptive, entrepreneurial and comfortable navigating change,” she said. “When AI moves quickly, youth are often the first to experiment with it.” She said automation will primarily transform, not erase, sectors built on repetitive tasks such as administration, retail operations, and routine data work. But new layers of employment are emerging above them, including AI supervision and optimisation, customer-experience design, digital operations management, tech-enabled supply chains, and platform entrepreneurship. “Automation is not only changing jobs; it’s changing how young South Africans imagine work itself. Lots of young people want a career portfolio, a job, a side hustle, a gig, a family business and the current education infrastructure is not friendly to that,” Gqomo added. A recurring theme across the Reskilling Revolution initiative is misalignment: education and policy cycles move in years, while AI capability cycles move in months. “The key gap is alignment, not ability,” Richards said. “African youth are creative, resilient and adaptive. The system must ensure early AI fluency, applied learning, and recognition of alternative credentials.” Policies are slow to catch up, and this affects jobs. Short training programs and certificates are not taken seriously in many hiring systems. That makes it harder for young people who taught themselves or learned informally to move up, even though employers are asking for exactly those skills. But that upside depends on infrastructure and policy catching up: connectivity access, devices, inclusive STEM pipelines, and recognition of non-traditional learning pathways. South Africa now faces a structural choice familiar across emerging economies: whether automation widens inequality or catalyses productivity growth. Without intervention, AI adoption could concentrate opportunity among already-connected urban youth while displacing routine workers. With targeted policy, rural digital hubs, broadband expansion, and skills-based hiring incentives, the same technologies could expand participation. “Africa’s youth are not behind the AI curve,” Richards said. “The real question is whether systems will empower youth to shape the new jobs.”
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