“Lagos is a difficult place to do business. There’s the high cost of rent and poor infrastructure – unreliable electricity and unreliable internet connectivity are some of the major issues affecting modern businesses in Lagos today. And, with that, there are still a lot of people going into entrepreneurship because of the high rate of unemployment. There is clearly the need for an easier and more affordable way to do business.”
This is why Modupe Macaulay believes there are opportunities for co-working spaces in Nigeria’s commercial hub, and towards the end of last year she officially opened one, CapitalSquare.
She had been inspired by the concept a few years earlier when she discovered that one of her heroes, Maria Popova, a writer living in New York and founder of the blog Brain Pickings, had used a co-working space.
“It just seemed like an amazing idea to me; the ability to share a workspace with people doing interesting and not necessarily related things. There would be so many opportunities to learn, to work together, to come up with new ideas, to start great things… At that point, it was the community aspect that caught my attention, and I thought it would be great to have something like that in Lagos,” Macaulay told How we made it in Africa. “So I wrote it down as something I’d like to do someday and forgot about it.
Read more at How We Made it in Africa
