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Ibadan is surprisedly Nigeria’s startup capital city after Lagos in the latest Global Startup Ecosystem Index Report 2021 by StartupBlink.
Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, has surpassed Nairobi, Kenya and is now the highest-ranking city in Africa, gaining 5 spots to 122nd. Kenya now ranks 136th.
Lagos among Top 50 global cities for E-commerce & Retail Technology
Lagos is also ranked in the global top 50 cities for E-commerce & Retail Technology and in the global top 100 for both Transportation Technology and Education Technology. The Nigerian city of Lagos has become the top African startup ecosystem, ranked 122nd after switching places with
Ibadan jumps 601 spots to rank 353rd globally
Ibadan, western Nigeria, saw a massive increase in ranking, jumping 601 spots to 353rd globally and 2nd in Nigeria, surpassing the Nigerian capital of Abuja. The latter, ranked 3rd nationally, fell 12 spots to 466th, while Port Harcourt decreased by 6 spots to 906th.
Enugu debuts among the Top 1000
The newest Nigerian city in the rankings, Enugu, ranks 978th globally and 5th nationally. Benin City has increased 9 spots to 979th, while Kano jumped 14 spots to 981st. Enugu debut on the global ranking list is remarkable having witnessed series of startup-related activities in recent times to underscore the state government’s increasing focus on tech innovation and youth entrepreneurship.
In total, Nigeria has 7 cities in the global top 1000 and continues to have the highest number of ranked cities of any African nation.
The Global Startup Ecosystem Index by StartupBlink has been updated annually since 2017 and is the world’s most comprehensive startup ecosystem ranking of 1000 cities and 100 countries. The Global Startup Ecosystem Index is built using hundreds of thousands of data points processed by an algorithm which takes into account several dozens of parameters.
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“As the world manages to slowly but surely innovate its way out of a devastating pandemic, it is clear that a new reality has emerged. Firstly, trends such as E-Commerce and remote work have accelerated at unprecedented speed, accelerating us toward an inevitable future where our digital presence is at times more dominant than our physical presence,” said CEO, StartupBlink, Eli David.
A notable increase in Africa is Nigeria now ranked 63rd globally. But overall, Nigeria still ranks behind South Africa that increased 4 spots to be ranked 48th globally. It will be the first time since this report was published, we have an African country in the top 50, StartupBlink noted.
Nigeria is the highest-ranking country in Western Africa and the 3rd highest ranking country in Africa.
US leads the world
The top 10 cities are San Francisco Bay, New York, Beijing, Los Angeles Area and London Others are Boston Area, Shanghai, Tel Aviv Area, Moscow and Bangalore. The US account for half of these The US leading the top 5 countries have all maintained their rank from last year, however, there are several deep changes and interesting insights. “Firstly, the United States maintains a massive lead over the 2nd ranked United Kingdom, showing a strong and dominant innovation scene across the 267 USA cities ranked in this report. Last year, the UK had a relatively large lead over the 3rd ranked country Israel, but this difference has now narrowed substantially with the UK and Israel having almost the same total score.
Brexit impacting UK ecosystem
For the first time since 2017, it seems that Brexit does have some negative influence on the UK ecosystem, which can also be seen in the rankings decline of London (more on that below). One more interesting development is a change in the group which we refer to as the “Big 4” Startup Ecosystems: the US, UK, Israel, and Canada. Canada is still ranked 4th, but it is now much closer to the solid ecosystem of Germany at the 5th spot than to the UK and Israel.
