As the Nigerian company marks its seventh birthday, its 52,000 active businesses and 3,000+ industries raise a question: do African small businesses need many specialized tools, or one
flexible foundation?
Afobata, founded in Nigeria in 2019 by software engineer Virginus Alajekwu, has evolved from an ecommerce and software development company into a multi-tenant, multi-service technology platform.
The company says more than 52,000 active businesses now run on its platform across over 3,000
industries. Afobata CEO Virginus Alajekwu says the scale and diversity of businesses using its infrastructure raise a broader question for Africa’s digital economy: do small businesses need a
collection of specialized tools, or can a single flexible technology foundation support many of their
operations?
For most small businesses in Africa, going digital means assembling separate tools for selling, booking,
payments and customer records. The market that needs those tools is very large. The 2021 national survey by Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency (SMEDAN) counted about 39.6 million micro, small and medium enterprises in the country.
The survey found they contributed roughly 46 percent of GDP and about 88 percent of employment. Across sub-Saharan Africa, SMEs account for nearly 95 percent of registered businesses and around half of GDP, according to
figures cited by SAP Africa.
Yet many remain under-digitized. A World Bank report found that fewer than
one in three African firms that have adopted digital technologies use them intensively.
Cost is a large part of the reason. A recent Vodacom analysis of SME digitalization reported that nearly
70 percent of African SMEs had invested in technology in the past year, but 58.3 percent named the cost of upgrades
and renewals as their biggest barrier, and 32 percent pointed to a lack of digital skills.
Afobata has spent its first seven years testing a different model.
Virginus Alajekwu incorporated the company in 2019. He taught himself to code at 13 and later earned a
Computer Science degree from Imo State University. Afobata began as an e-commerce and software
development company that built websites to order.
Alajekwu says the pattern became hard to ignore: the company kept rebuilding near-identical features for different clients, and most projects needed the
same core tools. The company chose to pre-build those tools once and let customers customize them,
which meant rebuilding around a multi-tenant architecture.
In that model many independent businesses run on one shared system, each with isolated data and its own branding.
The range is what separates Afobata from most software companies of its size. Its customers now span more than 3,000 business types, including online1
stores, SaaS products, crypto exchanges, utility bill
payment services, flight booking systems, e-learning platforms, hospital record systems and logistics