Mr. Sim Shagaya
“Build for the market in front of you, not the headline above you.”
In 2012, Sim Shagaya recognized an undeniable structural inflection point across West Africa. As internet connectivity began rippling through urban centres, commerce remained overwhelmingly analog, constrained by physical retail boundaries and fragmented distribution channels.
With Konga, Shagaya set out not merely to create an online storefront, but to engineer the foundational infrastructure of African digital trade. Overcoming absent payment rails, nascent logistics, and trust deficits, Konga built proprietary delivery fleets and pioneered payment-on-delivery systems.
That pioneering operational rigor set the commercial spine for Nigerian tech. In 2019, Shagaya launched uLesson, channeling his conviction toward Africa's most urgent demographic imperative: accessible, world-class K-12 education.
Recognizing bandwidth realities, uLesson deployed custom offline SD cards, ultra-compressed streaming, and localized curricula, scaling learning to hundreds of thousands of students across the continent. As the Chancellor of Miva Open University, he is now pioneering accredited, borderless tertiary education.