Inside Ogun State’s First Real Bet on Rural Tech Talent

In 2012, Adefisoye Adeshola Joseph was a student at Moshood Abiola Polytechnic with a simple observation. Nobody was selling noodles and eggs at the school gate, and students were hungry for it. He started the business himself, then hired classmates to help him keep up with demand.

It wasn’t a tech idea. But it taught him something he’d build a career on: find the gap, build something to fill it, then bring others along.

More than a decade later, that lesson has grown into N.E.Y.I Techpreneurship Hub, based in Araromi, Abeokuta, right across from the polytechnic where it all started.

The gap N.E.Y.I is closing is bigger than noodles. Ogun State has a dense cluster of universities and polytechnics, but a large share of graduates leave school without the digital skills or industry exposure needed to work in Nigeria’s tech economy. N.E.Y.I exists to change that, specifically for people in rural and semi-urban areas who are usually left out of innovation hub conversations entirely.

What sets it apart is the structure. Instead of running one-off training sessions, N.E.Y.I moves participants through six stages: Discover, Train, Incubate, Attach, Launch, and Mentor. People come in learning digital marketing, prompt engineering, and AI tools, then get connected to real opportunities, incubation support, and mentorship as they build their own ventures.

The numbers suggest the model is working. N.E.Y.I has built a network of over 20,000 entrepreneurs and young people, trained more than 6,000, supported over 5,000 startups, and incubated more than 500 ventures. The hub also runs community programs like Scoutpreneurship in Tech and Kidpreneurship in Tech, aimed at introducing tech skills earlier and more broadly.

In 2024, the Tony Elumelu Foundation backed the hub with funding that let it acquire a permanent site in Araromi. That space is now being expanded into a larger co-working and innovation campus.

The recognition has followed. N.E.Y.I was selected by the Office for Nigerian Digital Innovation, under NITDA and the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, as the iHatch Innovation Hub for Ogun State’s fifth cohort. It has also been recognized by the Industrial Training Fund, Junior Chamber International, and the Ogun Tech Community.

Adefisoye’s plan now is to turn N.E.Y.I into a model other rural innovation hubs across Nigeria and Africa can follow. For a hub built on the idea that geography shouldn’t decide who gets access to opportunity, that ambition tracks.