About
I build things so the next generation learns better than we did
Engineer first, founder now, researcher in between. One thread runs through all of it.
Before I wrote software for a living, I ran a newsroom. In 2017 I started BigNaijaGist, a social blog for Nigerian news. It was my first lesson in how information travels online, and how much it matters that it's true.
Then I became a software engineer, and spent years across almost every kind of product: healthcare platforms used in Nigerian government hospitals, an AI talent-management system serving companies in ten countries, learning apps, IoT systems that water plants more reliably than most people do. I led teams, shipped fast, and got good at turning messy problems into working software.
Somewhere along the way, a pattern emerged that I couldn't stop seeing. The most interesting products I worked on were the ones that taught people things: a learning platform here, an education app there. And the most broken systems I encountered weren't technical at all. They were the schools around me, running the education of millions of children on paper registers and goodwill.
The problems worth my next decade weren't just technical. They were educational.
Why Oponeko
In 2024 I founded Oponeko to build what I kept wishing existed: an operating system for African schools. Admissions, attendance, results, fees, communication with families, all the unglamorous infrastructure that determines whether a school runs on insight or on guesswork. We launched the platform in 2025 and are now growing it across Nigeria, one carefully-served school at a time.
Building for schools taught me that distribution here is trust, that teachers are the real users, and that offline isn't an edge case. Those lessons show up in my writing. I try to document the journey honestly, including the mistakes.
The research thread
Alongside the company, I work on AI research: large language models, fake-news detection, fact verification, and educational AI, with a particular interest in African languages and low-resource settings. The two halves feed each other. The company keeps the research honest about real constraints; the research keeps the company ambitious about what schools could become.
I don't believe Africa's AI future should be imported. The datasets, the languages, the failure modes, the opportunities are all different here, and they deserve builders and researchers who know the context firsthand.
What I believe
- Education compounds. Almost every problem I care about gets easier in a generation that was taught well.
- Trustworthy information is infrastructure. A society that can't tell true from false can't make good decisions, and AI will either worsen that or fix it.
- Boring foundations enable exciting futures. There is no AI tutor without a digitized register. Build the foundations first.
- Build where you understand. The hardest problems in my market are invisible from outside it. That's the advantage.
Where this goes
The long-term picture: Oponeko running schools across Africa, research that makes AI trustworthy in the languages people actually speak, and a body of writing that helps the next founder start sooner than I did. If you're working on any piece of that, I'd like to hear from you.