Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud

Nigerian entrepreneur Fara Ashiru built her fintech platform, Okra, on Amazon Web Services in 2020. She would pay AWS in dollars even as Okra earned in naira because American cloud providers did not accept payments in local currency at the time. The bills were staggering. … This model was unsustainable. The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024. “The bills were staggering,” Ashiru told Rest of World. “Combine that with Nigeria’s economic challenges — rising inflation and forex volatility — and it became clear that this model was unsustainable.” Ashiru took things into her own hands, and Okra set up cloud infrastructure with servers in data centers in Nigeria and South Africa in 2024. Later that year, the cloud operations were spun off into a new company called Nebula, which allows anyone in Nigeria to run their website, app, or workflow on its cloud and pay in naira. Nebula is the latest entrant in the Nig ... Read full article.