A few months ago, Chris Nwamba, a popular Nigerian developer and tech evangelist took to Twitter to vent about a very familiar issue: visa. As a superstar developer, Chris gets a lot of requests to participate at various conferences across the world, even the famous Google I/O Conference. But each time these events hold, Chris never gets to attend because his visa application is usually rejected.
Last year, I worked with deepstreamHub (a realtime SaaS startup in Germany). I was invited over for on-boarding and meetings. Guess who couldn’t go? Me. My Visa application was denied.
— Christian Nwamba (@codebeast) June 3, 2018
Now, this is not peculiar to Chris alone. The visa application process is one of the most difficult issues Nigerians face. Indeed, despite our economic strength, the Nigerian passport is one of the least respectable in the world, making it harder for our visa applications to be accepted.
Another popular developer, Prosper Otemuyiwa, has also had his visa application rejected.
Meanwhile, as a developer, conferences, meetups and other events are hugely important; they help to share knowledge and trends going on in the tech world. Let’s not forget developer events are also important for networking and developing new contacts with developers from all across the world.
…and here, 2018 came. I applied for the US visa to speak at Zeit Day conference with my friend @unicodeveloper. Had letters of invitation from @zeithq. Had recommendation letter from my employer, @theflutterwave. What else could I have been missing? Yet, I was denied again.
— Christian Nwamba (@codebeast) June 3, 2018
Unfortunately, due to visa problems, Chris and countless other Nigerian and African developers never get to travel for these events. Let’s not also forget that travelling abroad is not cheap!
A few months ago, I was frustrated at not being able to attend developer events because of visa challenges. Some really awesome engineers from Microsoft came up with an idea that can help build learning bridges for Africans #thread
— Christian Nwamba (@codebeast) July 16, 2018
But when Chris shared his story on Twitter, it drew the attention of literally thousands of people. And interestingly, it also caught the attention of some very popular developers too.
Introducing Concatenate.io
Working together, these developers have come up with a fix for this problem: Concatenate.io. Basically, Concatenate.io is a free conference for Nigerian developers.
Most of us can’t
1. Afford to go to international conferences…
2. and even when we can (or get sponsored), we are denied visas.Since this is the case, @sarah_edo alongside a team of badass awesome developers decided to bring the conference to us.
— Christian Nwamba (@codebeast) July 16, 2018
“Considering that Nigerian youths (which has the largest ecosystem) of developers in Africa are the most victims of Visa denials, we decided to start the first African International Conference in Lagos, Nigeria,” said Chris Nwamba.
Concatenate.io is barely a month old but its conference promises to deliver much of the benefits that characterize similar foreign events. Developers and tech enthusiast engage in discussions ranging from web frameworks to design system, performance, and animation.
Even more interesting, the first ever Concatenate.io conference has already drawn the attention of important tech personalities. These include Jeremy Keith, Burke Holland, Ire Aderinokun, Sarah Drasner, Egwuenu Gift, Prosper Otemuyiwa amongst many others.
First Concatenate.io Conference Will be “Light”
To salvage things and make Concatenate a success from the ground up, Chris shares that they’ve decided to “start lightly”, favouring the option of having some speakers speak remotely.
We were willing to invest in having as many developers as available to attend and as many great speakers available to speak. The only way we could do this without going broke was to start with a remote conference.
Remote implies that some speakers outside Africa are allowed to speak from their offices/homes while they are projected on different large screens and they can also interact with the audience.
On the other hand, some speakers will speak physically at the event venue.
— Christian Nwamba (@codebeast) July 16, 2018
The first ever Concatenate.io conference already has a date. The conference holds on August 9th and 10th in Lagos, Nigeria and registration for the event have started online.
For attendees hoping to see that Palo Alto geekiness and extravaganza, there’s a real chance that could happen. The conference was announced only yesterday, but it has already gotten support from Cloudinary, a cloud-based data management company, as well as Microsoft, Mozilla, and Zone Tech Park.
Hopefully, more companies, particularly Nigerian companies, will catch on and give support to the event.
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