By Kehinde Ogundare, Country Head, Zoho Nigeria
Nigeria’s mid-market firms occupy an uncomfortable position. They are too large to rely on the informal flexibility that often keeps small enterprises afloat yet too small to command the capital, engineering talent, and pricing power that multinational competitors bring into the same market.
This segment is expected to help scale local industry, yet it operates inside a macroeconomic environment that punishes scale before rewarding it. Persistent inflation, currency depreciation, and rising input and energy costs have become defining features of doing business in Nigeria. For firms with dozens rather than thousands of employees, this volatility squeezes already-thin margins and significantly shortens planning horizons.
Layered onto this is a structural talent challenge, widely known in Nigeria as japa, a term describing the sustained outward migration of skilled workers, particularly in technology. Between 2021 and 2023, more than 70,000 Nigerians received work or study visas, a significant share of them technology professionals departing for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Another survey also found that 70% of Nigerian tech startups struggle to hire software developers, while 57% have difficulty finding qualified product managers. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 further identifies skills gaps as a major barrier to business transformation across Sub-Saharan Africa, even as the region’s working age population expands.
Mid-market leaders are therefore asked to digitalise operations while facing shortages of the very people traditionally required to build that infrastructure, all while paying a currency premium for whatever technical talent remains.
What low-code AI actually means
One response gaining traction globally, and increasingly relevant to Nigeria, is low-code AI infrastructure. This refers to visual, drag-and-drop development environments, now embedded with contextual AI capabilities, that allow non-engineers to construct functioning software.
Gartner projected that 70% of new enterprise applications would be built using low-code or no-code technologies by 2025, up from under 25% in 2020, and forecasts that 80% of low-code users will come from outside IT departments by 2026. This is a genuine transfer of technical capability to the people who understand the business problem best, which is precisely the group Nigerian mid-market firms retain even when developers leave.
Cost efficiency and operational scalability
In a market where currency volatility can erode a technology budget within a single quarter, the economic case for low-code AI is compelling on its own terms. Development timelines that traditionally stretched across months can be reduced to days, since low-code platforms allow organisations to speed up software delivery substantially compared with conventional methods.
That speed compounds into cost avoidance. Firms no longer need to hire, retain, or repeatedly replace scarce and expensive engineering talent simply to maintain internal tools. Instead, existing operations staff can build, adjust, and retire workflows as business conditions shift, which matters enormously in an economy where demand patterns and input costs can change within weeks rather than years.
Building institutional resilience
Large enterprises can absorb the costs of japa by maintaining bench strength and paying above market rates to retain scarce specialists. Small businesses often sidestep the problem entirely by never building formal technical teams. Mid-market firms sit in the gap between these two strategies: large enough to need custom digital tools but too resource constrained to guarantee developer retention.
Low-code AI addresses this gap directly. Rather than competing for the same scarce technical talent, it gives the wider team the means to build and maintain what the business needs. Knowledge and capability sit with the people running day to day operations, not with a single specialist. That is what gives mid-market leaders a steady, credible path to digital transformation, one that holds regardless of how individual careers evolve.
