Who keeps this, and why.
A public record of the organisations building Nigeria's startup ecosystem: the hubs, funds, programmes, agencies and networks a founder might need and usually cannot find in one place.
Who runs it
SENPAI FUTURES LTD, a company registered in Abuja. We build software, and we work with organisations in this sector, so we are not a neutral party and there is no use pretending otherwise.
The record is free. Nobody pays to be listed, nobody can pay to rank higher, and there is no ranking. If we ever take money from an organisation in here, that will be said on their page.
Where these entries came from
Most of them were assembled from two public sources: the member directory published by AfriLabs, and the partner and sponsor lists on the sites of organisations we already had. Each one was then checked by hand for a live website and a city.
That method has a bias worth stating plainly. It finds organisations who belong to networks and who appear on other people's websites. It misses everyone else. Co-creation Hub is not an AfriLabs member, so the biggest hub in the country was invisible to our own sweep until we added it by hand. Funds, newsrooms and corporate programmes are underrepresented for the same reason. There will be others we have not noticed yet.
What each entry has to have
Two things, and they are not negotiable. Its own words, quoted and attributed, never a description written in their voice by us. And a city we could actually source, from their own site or a named document. Where we could not source a city, the organisation is not here at all rather than here in the wrong place.
Everything else, a missing contact, a missing logo, a site nobody has touched in years, is shown on the page rather than used to keep an organisation out. Most entries are incomplete. That is the normal state of this record, not a defect in it.
What confirmed means
Every page says whether the organisation has checked it. Today 0 of 111 have. The other 111 are our reading of a public website on a particular day, and some of them will be wrong. Claiming an entry is free, takes about three minutes and needs no account. Claim yours.
What is not here
- Individuals. Organisations only. A record of people is a different product with different problems.
- Anywhere outside Nigeria. The research turned up organisations in Tunis and in Senegal and they were left out rather than the boundary being widened to fit them.
- Scores and rankings. Cities are never ranked against each other and organisations are never rated. Counting what is recorded is not the same as judging what is there.
- Anything without a source. Where an organisation claims a number we cannot check, we record that they claim it. We do not repeat it as fact.
The empty spaces
A city with nothing against its name, or a category with nothing in it, means one of two things: nobody is doing it, or nobody has told us. Both are worth fixing and only one of them is our fault. The gaps are left visible rather than hidden, because a directory that shows only what it has tells you nothing about what it is missing.
Getting something changed
Use the form, or write to hello@senpaifutures.com. A person reads everything and nothing is published automatically. If an entry about you is wrong, saying so is enough; the burden of proof is not on you.