Across sub-Saharan Africa, technology districts modelled (and often dubbed) after California's Silicon Valley are reshaping cities, economies and everyday life. Nigeria has hosted the highest number of tech hubs on the continent since 2019, and the city of Lagos has become a central node of this transformation, with neighbourhoods such as Yaba ("Silicon Lagoon") and new technologically saturated developments such as Itana/Talent City attracting global investors, ICT corporations and a fast-growing community of coders, entrepreneurs, hardware assemblers and users.
Despite the strategic importance of African ICT ecosystems for both the EU's digital agenda and the global political economy, very little European social-science research has examined them from the inside, and almost none has focused on Nigeria. Existing studies have tended to concentrate on networks of formal tech hubs and on the economic strategies of entrepreneurs, leaving aside the everyday practices, creativity, frictions and future-oriented imaginations of the people who actually live and work in these "silicon places".
LAGOSTECH addresses this gap. It is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship that combines a 24-month outgoing phase at San José State University (SJSU, USA) with a 12-month return phase at KU Leuven (Belgium) and a long tem fieldwork in Lagos, Nigeria. Its overall aim is to investigate, through long-term ethnographic research, how Lagos's tech communities negotiate, adopt, reshape and at times reject Information and Communication Technologies, and how they imagine — or "prefigure" — their digital futures.
The project pursues three interconnected scientific objectives: (1) to understand whether and how tech experts, entrepreneurs, users and consumers in Lagos contribute to local digital innovation, including in zones of opportunity outside formal tech hubs; (2) to identify the sociocultural and structural conditions, beyond investment volume or technical efficacy, that shape the success, failure, inclusion and exclusion dynamics of Lagos's silicon places; and (3) to examine these places as a "total social fact", attending to future prefiguration, socialisation, ideologies, subjectivities and power relations.
By centring local creativity and African perspectives on ICTs, LAGOSTECH aims to inform European policy on Africa–EU digital collaboration, support more inclusive partnerships between European and African ICT actors, and contribute to UN Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality, industry and innovation, and reduced inequalities.
