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In March 2023, Adewale Adekomaiya lay trapped in a mangled car in Lagos while passersby filmed and a bystander tried to rob him. That near-death experience shattered his assumption that travel could wait for “later.” Within months, the Senior QA Architect and his wife packed their lives into a €900 ($1,048) digital nomad visa to Malta, spending two years working remotely across seven European countries. Now back in Nigeria with a newborn son, Adekomaiya tells JOHN ADOYI about the true costs of constant mobility, navigating racism abroad, and why his family’s next journey is taking them across Africa. Passers-by stood around the wreckage and filmed. Adewale Adekomaiya was trapped in a car in Yaba, a neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2023, just months after getting married. No one came to help. The only person who approached, Adekomaiya said, was trying to rob him. As he waited for help that didn’t seem to come, his thoughts wandered somewhere else: to his new wife, and to all the things they had planned to do together. Adekomaiya’s car was involved in an accident in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2023. Image Source: Adewale Adekomaiya. “I just got married,” he told TechCabal. “If I had died, I would have just gone without experiencing the world with my wife.” Until then, Adekomaiya had treated life as something to be enjoyed later. He would work and save, thinking he would eventually have the time and money to see the world. The fateful accident made “later” feel less certain. Within months, he and his wife had left Nigeria for Malta, where they built a life around remote work and travel. Two years later, after returning home for the birth of their son, Adekomaiya is preparing to leave again. This time, he wants his child to see the world with him. From IT support to remote work Adekomaiya’s career in tech started with helping other people use computers. He worked in IT support at Great Nigeria Insurance, an insurance underwriting and financial advisory firm, where he helped his colleagues resolve computer problems, according to him. Soon after, he returned to school to get a degree. In 2018, someone introduced him to quality assurance (QA), a field in tech that allowed him to combine his IT experience with the programming knowledge he had picked up as a support tech specialist. “I was able to merge that with my little knowledge of programming,” he said. Adekomaiya has worked in QA ever since, eventually becoming a senior engineer in the field. Today, he works as a QA architect. By the time he and his wife decided to leave Nigeria, he was working for a US company, which meant he could take his job with him. That flexibility would become important when the couple began figuring out how to turn their idea of travelling into an actual life outside Nigeria. Why Malta? Adekomaiya did not simply choose Malta because it had always been on his bucket list of places to travel to. Rather, the country offered an easy route for him and his wife to begin their nomadic life as far back as 2023. Portugal was also on his mind, but its embassy in Lagos was closed when they were making their plans, he said. Meanwhile, Malta had a digital nomad visa that Adekomaiya could apply for from home. He needed to show that he met the minimum income requirement and worked for a company outside the European Union (EU). Since he was working remotely for a United States-based company, he already had the documents to support his application. The process suited him because it did not require the kind of repeated embassy visits he wanted to avoid. “I hate stress when it comes to all this application of trying to apply for visas and the like,” he said. “But for this one, I saw that we could do the whole application from the comfort of the house.” Adekomaiya said the Malta application cost him about €300 ($350) per person—for himself and his wife—in 2023. A dependent attracted an additional €300 ($350), putting the couple’s application costs at €600 ($700); additional costs, including primary health insurance, which was a mandatory requirement for applicants, took the total package to €900 ($1,048), according to Adekomaiya. Malta visa applicants also had to meet a minimum income requirement, which he said was about an additional €2,000 ($2,330) at the time. Insurance was another requirement. Applicants had to provide an insurance contract covering a year and renew it annually. Adekomaiya and his wife opted for coverage that included outpatient treatment, which does not require hospital admission, and inpatient treatment, which covers care requiring a hospital stay. The plan also included Schengen coverage in case they needed medical attention while travelling to another country, according to Adekomaiya. Adekomaiya found a step-by-step guide online that made the application easier and helped him put the required documents together. In 2023, the application worked out, and Adekomaiya and his wife moved to Malta. Adekomaiya and his wife visited a small island near Malta, Gozo. Image Source: Adewale Adekomaiya. The couple spent about $2,400 on their flights from Nigeria to Malta, partly because they booked late, Adekomaiya said. When they arrived in Malta, they initially rented an Airbnb, a short-let apartment, for about two weeks, paying between €100 ($116.50) and €120 ($140) a night before moving into a three-bedroom apartment. The apartment cost between €900 ($1,048) and €1,200 ($1,400) a month, with one of the rooms serving as his workspace, he noted. Two years on the move Malta became Adekomaiya and his wife’s home base, but they did not spend all two years between 2023 and 2025 there. The couple used the island as a base for exploring Europe. They travelled to Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and the UK, visiting cities including Milan, Barcelona, and Madrid, according to Adekomaiya. They also went to Tenerife, the most populous island in Spain’s Canary Islands region. For the newly married couple, the appeal
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Walk around TechBBQ in Copenhagen, Denmark, and it does not take long to notice that the definition of a tech startup has become broad. There are the software companies one expects at a gathering of over 10,000 startups and investors. But there are also founders working on quantum computing, biotechnology, medical diagnostics, robotics, security systems, new food technologies, and ideas that have spent years inside university laboratories. For African founders and investors, this was perhaps the most interesting lesson about TechBBQ 2026, held at Copenhagen’s Bella Centre on August 26 and 27. The technology industry is broadening its scope. The African ecosystem has produced some extraordinary companies, but the ideas that attract serious VC backing can sometimes feel concentrated in certain areas. Payments, lending, digital banking, logistics, e-commerce, and increasingly AI have been the main focus areas. TechBBQ revealed that some of the money, attention, and entrepreneurial ambition that flowed into apps, marketplaces, and software-as-a-service companies over the past decade is moving towards harder problems like health, energy, defence, biology, and the physical economy. The event had a dedicated Life Science x Deep Tech stage. It brought together scientists, founders, investors, and researchers working across quantum technologies, life sciences, and artificial intelligence. Even the venue for TechBBQ’s Investor Day mentioned the change. VCs, corporate investors, and angels gathered at the University of Copenhagen’s Maersk Tower, in a district that TechBBQ says has 40,000 researchers, students, and staff, and has produced about 500 research-based startups. This is venture capital moving closer to building sustainable solutions across healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing. Lesson one: Look beyond apps Deep tech challenges many traditional VC assumptions. A biotechnology company may spend years before earning meaningful revenue. Quantum computing requires specialised researchers and expensive equipment. Medical devices face clinical and regulatory hurdles. Defence startups must navigate governments and procurement systems. Climate technologies may require factories and physical infrastructure. These are not businesses that can always demonstrate product-market fit within six months and with a few thousand dollars in cloud computing credits. Yet they are moving towards the centre of the European technology conversation. TechBBQ described the gap between technologies that might arrive “someday” and those actually reaching the market as narrowing. Its Deep Tech Day focused on technologies including quantum computing, biotechnology, diagnostics, precision medicine, and sustainable food systems. The important part is not simply that these technologies exist. Universities have produced ambitious science for decades. Investors are increasingly trying to work out how to turn more of that science into companies. TechBBQ’s deep-tech pitch competition, for example, was open to companies with less than €2 million in funding that had a validated concept, prototype, or early scientific proof of concept. Eight companies were selected to pitch technologies addressing human and planetary health. That is a rather different starting point from another payments app. It also says something about where venture capital thinks the next valuable companies might emerge. TechBBQ event in Copenhagen, Denmark. Image Source: TechBBQ Lesson two: Difficult industries are becoming investable VC has traditionally asked whether a company can capture a large market. Increasingly, European investors are also asking whether the technology is strategically important to a country. That brings governments, universities, and large industrial companies much closer to the startup ecosystem. It also makes the boundary between technology policy, industrial policy, and national security increasingly difficult to see. There is an African lesson here. Some of the continent’s biggest problems sit in sectors investors have historically found difficult: energy, agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, water, and transport infrastructure. They are difficult partly because software alone cannot solve them. But difficult does not necessarily mean uninvestable. Lesson three: Hard technology needs different money The change in ideas requires a change in money. Building a consumer app and developing a new biotechnology platform cannot be financed in quite the same way. The latter can require more capital, longer development periods, and investors willing to tolerate technical risk before there is much evidence of commercial demand. Some businesses will also need grants, government procurement, university partnerships, and corporate capital alongside conventional venture funding. That was another noticeable feature of TechBBQ. The ecosystem was not organised simply around founders meeting venture capitalists. Researchers, foundations, policymakers, universities, corporations, and public investment institutions were part of the conversation. This is partly because deep tech makes them necessary. A scientist trying to commercialise a university discovery needs something quite different from what a founder building another enterprise software product needs. Intellectual property must leave the university. Laboratories and equipment may be required. Regulatory approvals can take years. Specialist talent is scarce. Europe still struggles with this. One TechBBQ session asked about “Europe’s biotech spinout challenge”. Another examined how the Nordics could translate research into companies. The underlying problem is that Europe produces excellent science but has struggled to build enormous technology companies from it. The response appears to be an attempt to build a bridge between science and capital. It is worth watching because Africa also faces the problem. TechBBQ event in Copenhagen, Denmark. Image Source: TechBBQ Lesson four: Diversity of capital produces diversity of ideas African venture capital has become remarkably good at funding a relatively narrow range of ideas. Fintech is the obvious example. Payments, digital banking, lending, and financial infrastructure have attracted some of the continent’s largest venture rounds and produced many of its most valuable technology companies. There are good reasons for this. Financial infrastructure remains inadequate in many markets, mobile money has created unusual opportunities, and the potential customer base is enormous. But success can create its own gravity. Once investors understand a business model, more founders build versions of it, and more investors become comfortable funding them. The result can be an ecosystem with plenty of entrepreneurial activity but relatively little variation in what receives serious capital. TechBBQ provided an interesting contrast. A founder developing biotechnology could be followed on stage by someone working on quantum computing, food systems, defence, healthcare or climate technology. The ideas often seemed to start with a scientific or
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French aerospace company Thales Alenia Space and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) have been selected to build Nigeria’s next communications satellites, as the government moves to expand broadband capacity and replace its ageing NIGCOMSAT-1R. The selection follows Federal Executive Council (FEC) approval on August 22 for the acquisition and deployment of NIGCOMSAT-2A and NIGCOMSAT-2B, allowing Nigeria Communications Satellite Limited (NIGCOMSAT) to move its long-running satellite replacement programme into the next phase. The two satellites are expected to provide additional capacity for broadband, broadcasting, enterprise connectivity and government services, particularly in areas where fibre and other terrestrial networks are too costly or difficult to deploy. The timing is critical. NIGCOMSAT-1R, Nigeria’s current communications satellite, was launched on December 19, 2011, with a 15-year design life and is reaching the end of that period in 2026. NIGCOMSAT says careful management of its onboard fuel will allow the satellite to remain operational until 2028, giving the government a limited window to finance, build and launch its replacement. Although the FEC has approved the contract, the project’s final cost has not yet been disclosed because financing is still being finalised. Jane Nkechi Egerton-Idehen, managing director and CEO of NIGCOMSAT, told TechCabal in a statement that the final amount will be made public once the financing is closed. “The amount will be official once the financing is closed,” Egerton-Idehen said. “That’s the stage that is ongoing now after the contract FEC approved. The funding is vendor-financed and backed by the Export-Import Banks.” The financing structure means the satellite vendors will provide financing backed by export-import banks. This is significant because satellite projects require substantial upfront investment, not just for the spacecraft but also for launch, insurance, ground stations, control centres, testing, and training. The selection of Thales Alenia Space and IAI comes after a competitive procurement process that began more than two years ago. NIGCOMSAT started defining the technical requirements in early 2024 and issued an Expression of Interest in June that year. The procurement process advanced in 2025, with major international aerospace companies, including Thales Alenia Space, Airbus, IAI, China Great Wall Industry Corporation, and Turkish Aerospace Industries, participating. The final selection assigns responsibility to the French and Israeli companies for delivering the two satellites and associated infrastructure. The contract goes beyond manufacturing the spacecraft. It includes launch and in-orbit testing, satellite control centres, tracking and telemetry stations, simulators, operational software, documentation, insurance and technology transfer. NIGCOMSAT-2A is planned for deployment at 42.5°E, and the project also includes backup ground infrastructure to improve the satellite system’s resilience. The satellites are designed to do more than replace NIGCOMSAT-1R. They will add capacity for broadband, broadcasting, enterprise connectivity and government applications, with the potential to extend services to communities that terrestrial networks struggle to reach. That matters because Nigeria’s broadband expansion— at 56.7% in June—increasingly depends on reaching areas where building fibre and other terrestrial infrastructure is commercially difficult. Fibre remains the preferred option for high-capacity broadband, particularly in urban areas, but deploying cables across sparsely populated or difficult terrain can be expensive. Satellites can cover large areas without requiring the same physical infrastructure to be built on the ground. The new satellites should therefore complement rather than replace Nigeria’s fibre and mobile networks. Their biggest value could come from filling coverage gaps where terrestrial infrastructure cannot be deployed economically. NIGCOMSAT’s additional capacity could be used by internet service providers, mobile operators, broadcasters, businesses and government agencies. These organisations could use satellite links to extend services without having to build their own long-distance networks. But more satellite capacity does not automatically mean cheaper or better internet for consumers. NIGCOMSAT and its partners will still have to turn the additional capacity into services that households and businesses can afford. The cost of satellite terminals, equipment, data plans and last-mile connections will determine how much of the new capacity reaches end users. That makes affordability as important as capacity. Nigeria could add significant satellite bandwidth without substantially closing its digital divide if the resulting services remain too expensive for the communities that need them most. The project is also intended to strengthen Nigeria’s wider space and digital technology ecosystem. NIGCOMSAT expects opportunities in areas such as satellite terminals, ground infrastructure, systems integration, technical support, telecommunications and broadcasting. Technology transfer and training could also help develop local expertise in satellite engineering, network operations and other specialised areas. The contract includes provisions for knowledge transfer, including training in space and ground-segment operations. The objective for Egerton-Idehen is ultimately to turn the satellite investment into practical value for Nigeria. “NIGCOMSAT-2A and NIGCOMSAT-2B will strengthen our national satellite capacity, expand connectivity and support critical communications across the country,” she said. “Our priority is to translate this investment into measurable value for Nigerians and position NIGCOMSAT for stronger impact within the global satellite and digital economy.” That commercial question could prove as important as the technical one. NIGCOMSAT is responsible for managing and commercialising Nigeria’s communications satellite assets. For the new satellites to deliver value, the additional capacity will need to attract sustained demand from telecom operators, ISPs, broadcasters, businesses and government agencies. The satellites could also strengthen Nigeria’s communications resilience. They can provide an alternative when terrestrial networks are damaged or unavailable, reducing reliance on foreign satellite infrastructure for some critical services. That has implications beyond broadband, including defence, emergency communications and other government operations. The FEC approval and selection of the two contractors mark important milestones, but the project is not yet complete. Financing still needs to be closed, followed by manufacturing, technical preparations, launch and in-orbit testing. The 2028 target gives NIGCOMSAT some breathing room because the company expects NIGCOMSAT-1R to remain operational until then. But it also sets a deadline to deliver the replacement before the existing satellite reaches the end of its extended operating life. The strategic case for the new satellites is straightforward: fibre and mobile networks cannot economically reach every community, and satellites can help fill some of those gaps. The harder question is whether Nigeria
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