Whose future? Imagining technology from Lagos

Lagos, Nigeria, is often called Africa’s Silicon Valley. But who actually gets to build the tech future there? At this stand you draw a life in Lagos’s technology economy: a young man who walks customers to the stalls of Computer Village, one of the largest electronics markets in Africa; a phone repairer with a degree in computer science; a self-taught cloud engineer; or a start-up founder who pitches to investors from Lagos to Singapore. You receive a month’s income in chips, pay your rent, transport and electricity, and then see which futures you can reach: a laptop to learn to code, a desk in a tech hub, a solar panel, a bigger shop, a move to Canada. Every price and every quote on the cards comes from interviews with people working in Lagos’s tech sector. In a few minutes you see how the same city offers very different futures depending on where you start, and you can compare your own guesses with what people in Lagos told the researcher. Based on anthropological fieldwork by the LAGOSTECH project at KU Leuven.