UNILAG poised to build Africa’s first Silicon Valley— Adebisi

Sunday Adebisi, director of Entrepreneurship and Skill Development Centre, at UNILAG shared with CHARLES OGWO in this interview how the university is prepared to build Africa’s first Silicon Valley, and many other insights from the centre. Excerpts;

What inspired your establishment of the UNILAG’s Entrepreneurship Centre?

The federal government in 2006 introduced entrepreneurship as a general course in the university. It was just dumped inside the curricula of the universities.

It became a challenge at a time in the university system, and because it was a new area, there was no specialisation, people do not really understand it; so, I began a research into why Nigeria is not globally competitive, that was sometime in 2014 to find out why everything Nigerians consume are imported, and they don’t produce what they use?

As at then, Nigeria was a leading economy in Africa, Lagos was the third largest economy in Africa; and the University of Lagos is the university in the heart of this Lagos.

Moreover, the University of Lagos was the first university to have a business faculty in the entirety of West Africa, and UNILAG was created to help build Nigeria’s commerce, produce people for the economy and industrial growth.

Hence, I argued there is nothing we’re supposed to focus on as a university, as much as I’m not saying we should not do medicine and engineering but the institution should tie more to commerce, enterprise creation and business.

That was what made me take up the challenge of establishing the entrepreneurship centre, once I came back from where I went to lead a commercial project.

In Silicon Valley, proximity between academia, venture capital, and entrepreneurial risk-taking created a self-reinforcing innovation loop. As the University of Lagos positions itself as Africa’s equivalent, what specific institutional behaviours – not just infrastructure – must change to attract founders, capital allocators, and global research partnerships simultaneously?

Entrepreneurship is mindset changing, that’s people being able to identify the problems in the society and solve those problems, by creating enterprise out of those problems, and solve them profitably.

Once they do that, the society is ready to do whatever it takes to exchange value for that. This became the first infrastructure the University of Lagos began with.

UNILAG is the Silicon Valley version of Nigeria, and Africa by extension. I was in Silicon Valley as a speaker in 2018 and 2019, where I spoke about African enterprise and the opportunities..

I made them understand that Africa is the future of the enterprise world, and that any company that is not in Africa, by 2030 does not have a future.

The University of Lagos has practically become a Silicon Valley because there are six hubs inside the university, including the design studio. We’re all in the same cluster for our students to be able to realise their entrepreneurship orientation and entrepreneurship journey.

It was a professor that gave Oleg Pakhad and his friend $6,000 and asked them to go down to the valley and outside the university and invest, today, see what Silicon Valley has become. That is the same thing UNILAG is doing.

There are 99 offices around the University of Lagos, and we have 67,000 students, most of them are loaded with innovation in their mindset. If they all be closer to us, we can create as many businesses as possible.

The UNILAG’s management have been so deliberate and intentional in making investment into innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mentorship through seminars and workshops is one institutional behaviour needed. The students are supposed to be mentored, and encouraged by industry experts through seminars and workshops to make their entrepreneurial journey successful.

If all other Nigeria universities can make investment of about 30 percent like what UNILAG has done, Nigeria will become like China in the next 10 years.

Stanford University succeeded not merely because of research excellence but because professors commercialised ideas, students took entrepreneurial leave, and failure carried limited stigma. How can UNILAG redesign incentives for lecturers and students so that venture creation becomes academically legitimate rather than extracurricular?

In the University of Lagos today, it’s more or less like students are getting dual degrees. You get your B.Sc Chemistry, B.Sc Political Science, and you get your certificate in Entrepreneurship.

Your certificate in Entrepreneurship can be Entrepreneurship Ordinary, Entrepreneurship Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Diamond. At UNILAG, it’s compulsory graduate with B.Sc Political Science, plus a certificate in Entrepreneurship.

So one thing we did, is to carry all the lecturers along. We selected 10 lecturers from each of the departments, and got them trained by 25 experts from Stanford University. Today, they are certified as Entrepreneurship and Innovation educators.

In UNILAG, we convert every course into Entrepreneurship. So if you are doing Economics, it’s Eco Entrepreneurship. If you are doing Music, it’s Music Entrepreneurship.

There is no discipline in this university that does not have its own commerce potential. So we trained the teachers to go back to the classroom, and make Entrepreneurs out of the students.

Beyond that, there is a programme vice-chancellor has been pushing for, which is Entrepreneurship Cafe, it is about, academic financial enhancement by being a consultant and creating, enterprise out of your discipline.

In UNILAG today, we patent whatever output that comes out of your research for you free of charge, for student and for staff; we register your business for you and to ensure that you are incorporated, thereby democratising creation of work.

Accelerators such as Y Combinator function as trust brokers between founders and investors, compressing due diligence through reputation networks. What would an authentically Nigerian accelerator ecosystem need to look like to build that same credibility without simply copying Silicon Valley templates?

Our own way of the building the ecosystem is by catching them young, which the Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Business Certification (EIBIC) programme is all about.

At U.S. Silicon Valley, the people are not necessarily students, for instance, in Stanford University, once you are a graduate, you go in there, you are looking for a funder; but in UNILAG, we are picking them from other levels.

We’re picking them, at age 16, once the student walk into University of Lagos. You’re walking into this university, and we’re telling you that there is a possibility.

How many students have you graduated? How many have started their own small scale businesses? How do you measure your impact?

We have mentored more than 4,000 entrepreneurs inside this hub, since I became the director of the Renewal Centre in 2015, and in the last three years, we’ve had nothing less than 200 businesses.

In fact, when we look at our Business, Innovation and Talents Expressions (BITE), we’ve done three BITEs, and had 900 businesses accumulated together.

We have seed funded, close to 50 businesses, and across Africa, we have the Youth Business Innovation Challenge (YBIC), the first would get £3,000. When I won the £600,000 pounds, I seed funded enterprise I created in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria.

These are solid enterprises today that, in a way, they discovered themselves through this programme, and it was a massive family data.

So we measure the impact by the number of startups, and students who are able to realise their entrepreneurial dream. The number of students that we have trained in this entrepreneurship programme today, are up to 40,000 students.

In the last three years, we have done, for just YBIC alone, 39,000 students.