Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg visits Nigeria in African knowledge quest

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is currently on a business trip to Africa, according to his Facebook page. Zuckerberg stopped over in Nigeria, Facebook‘s largest African market, to learn more about the country’s development and startup scene.

Zuckerberg was in Rome, Italy with his wife Priscilla Chan earlier this week.

“This is my first trip to sub-Saharan Africa,” he reveals on a Facebook post.

“I’ll be meeting with developers and entrepreneurs, and learning about the startup ecosystem in Nigeria. The energy here is amazing and I’m excited to learn as much as I can. Our first stop is the Co-creation Hub Nigeria (CcHUB) in Yaba.”

Zuckerberg said that he also spoke to children at a summer coding camp as well as entrepreneurs using the CcHUB.

Zuckerberg also met with a number of developers at CcHUB, like Temi Giwa who runs Life Bank, a blood bank which mobilises blood donations and delivers it to wherever it’s needed most. Zuckerberg also met with Andela, an engineering organisation which strives to build the next wave of technical leaders on the continent.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is currently in Nigeria meeting developers and promising entrepreneurs

The organisation runs a four-year technical leadership programme where the most successful candidates gets recruited and further shaped into well-rounded and competent developers.

So far, Andela has accepted over 200 engineers from a pool of more than 40 000 applicants. These developers will spend the next six months mastering their craft and will be contributing to open-source projects. They’ll then be placed in tech companies around the globe as full-time, distributed teammates.

“We are excited and honoured to welcome Mark Zuckerberg to Lagos. His visit reinforces not only his support of Andela’s mission, but his belief that indeed the next generation of great technology leaders will come out of Lagos, Nigeria and cities across Africa,” said the Director of Andela Lagos, Seni Sulyman.

“Andela has created a platform for passionate, driven software developers and engineers to break into the global tech ecosystem, but the barriers to entry are still very high.”

Mark’s visit demonstrates to all Nigerian developers and entrepreneurs that they’ve caught the attention of the tech world, and they are capable of succeeding on a truly global level,” he concluded.

The Facebook founder later met with key players running internet access programmes, backed by internet.org.

Feature image: Mark Zuckerberg via Facebook