“I didn’t see it becoming a business”: Day 1 to 1000 of Startbutton Africa

Mallick Bolakale laughed as he took me back to the early 2010s, when buying items from eBay in Nigeria required navigating an underground system.

Then, a Nigerian needed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to create an encrypted address and a broker with a foreign bank card and a shipping address in the United States to order items from the online marketplace, he recalled.

Buyers would first…