Page 22 - DPSA - Service Delivery Report

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
The Otigba Computer Village shows that sharing knowledge widely benefits all businesses in a cluster. Shutterstock
A ‘Computer Village’ in Lagos offers lessons on what it takes to
help small firms thrive
Senior Researcher at the University of Johannesburg, Oluseve Jegede, describes how knowledge sharing empowers the members of Nigeria’s tech small business cluster.
Nigeria’s Otigba Computer Village is arguably the biggest information, com- munications technology (ICT) market in Africa. It started off as a one-man business on a street called “Otigba” in Ikeja, the capital of Lagos State. Within a short time, it grew to a few thousand businesses occupying a vast area in the state. It represents an ICT solution centre for Nigeria, as well as West Af- rica.
Three years ago Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics estimated that the informal sector had accounted for as much as 41% of the country’s econo- my in 2015. The informal sector in Ni-
geria continues to grow for numerous reasons. These include:
• limited ability of the formal econo- my to absorb surplus labour (large- ly dominated by people aged be- tween 15 and 50 years);
• barriers to entry into the formal economy by young entrepreneurs who have ideas but little capital to compete with large firms in the for- mal sector;
• weak government institutions (reg- ulatory bodies); and
• poor economic conditions which are forcing many consumers to de- mand cheap goods and services.
The Otigba cluster is no exception. It remains largely informal despite its size, the volume of economic transac- tions being done daily and the techni- cal knowledge put to use in the market. Numerous studies have been done to evaluate the size and capacity of the cluster, its evolution, mode of opera- tion, performance, sustainability and constraints.
But before my research there had been no studies on how businesses within the cluster identified new and useful knowledge and how they applied that knowledge to innovation to increase their performance and profitability by scaling-up their operations.
20 SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW | Volume 12 No.3 of 2019