Facebook Set To Open Its Second African Office In Lagos, Nigeria

Social media giant, Facebook is set to open its second office in Nigeria. Chimdindu Aneke who is the Facebook program manager announced this via his social media platform, “we will be opening a Facebook office in Lagos, Nigeria in 2021”. Chimdindu Aneke also noted that the Facebook office is the second office to be opened in the continent but the first office to house a team of expert engineers building the future of Africa and beyond.

The office will be located in Lagos the commercial centre of Nigeria and will be fully operational before the second half of 2021. The establishment of the Lagos office is for the sole purpose of engineering, but not limited to engineering as other services like sales, policy, partnership, and communication. Moreover, Facebook has also planned on commencing the recruitment of qualified personnel to fill the enlisted positions. In the scheme of creating job opportunities, the Facebook Head of New Product Experimentation “Ime Archibong” also revealed that the platforms or opportunities Facebook is creating in Nigeria are strictly for those with technical talents within Nigeria.

Lagos which is the commercial zone of Africa, which also happens to be the next location to site the Facebook platform aims at boosting the growth in African tech across the sub-Sahara African countries. However, the Facebook headquarter stationed in Johannesburg, South Africa (which is also the first in the continent) has been running a successful business operation for the last five years and counting, which has Nunu Ntshingila-Njeke as the Head of the Facebook HQ in South Africa. The selected engineers in charge of the Facebook operations in Nigeria aim at contributing to the growth of African tech which also plans to extend its operations across other African countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa and other African countries.

Furthermore, statistics show that the use of the internet has appreciated greatly from 16% to 33.2% between 2015 till date within the three major countries in Africa such as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Facebook believes that its next billions of users will be rise from the sub-Saharan nations of Africa. Since 2015, Facebook has invested its resources and assets aiming to boost internet infrastructure development in Africa, which initially started in the three major countries of Africa.

In terms of internet infrastructure development, the 2Africa project is a consortium between Facebook and other telecom companies with the sole objectives of connecting 16 African nations to the rest of the world within these five years by installing subsea internet cables although the sixteen African nations.

Since 2015 Facebook has been installing internet cables in partnership with telecoms like MTN, MainOne, and Airtel in developing internet infrastructure in Africa.

Prior to investing in Africa, Facebook has foreseen the untapped profit vested in Africa but needs infrastructural development to channel this potential appropriately. The Facebook team as done the best job in developing Africa, likewise in 2018 when Facebook launched NG_Hub in consortium with CcHub, with the primary objective of connecting Africa to the rest of the world.