Facebook opens an office in Lagos, the second one in Africa

Facebook this week announced that is opening an office in Lagos, Nigeria. The office will support the Sub-Saharan region and is expected to become operational in H2 2021.

The new office will be the home for several teams including Sales, Partnerships, Policy, Communications, and it will also be the first office in Africa with a team of engineers.

“The opening of our new office in Lagos, Nigeria presents new and exciting opportunities in digital innovations to be developed from the continent and taken to the rest of the world. All across Africa, we’re seeing immense talent in the tech ecosystem, and I’m proud that with the upcoming opening of our new office, we’ll be building products for the future of Africa, and the rest of the world, with Africans at the helm. We look forward to contributing further to the African tech ecosystem,” said Ime Archibong, Facebook’s Head of New Product Experimentation.

Facebook opened its first office in Africa 5 five years ago in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Similar to South Africa, the official language in Nigeria is English. Nigeria is the country with more population in Sub-Saharan Africa, with almost 200 million persons. Naturally, Nigeria is becoming a country where companies start to invest in Africa.

Cloudflare, the biggest content delivery networks (CDN) in the world, pointed in 2018 that was seeing a 4% to 7% increase in traffic month on month in Africa.

Internet is still slow in Africa, as the majority of Internet content providers are located in North America and Western Europe. Usually, the servers are still located in Marseille, Paris, London, Lisbon, and sometimes Frankfurt or Amsterdam.

Facebook itself doesn't have their own data centers in Africa, but it's building a submarine cable 2Africa connecting Europe, East Africam, and West Africa. The submarine cable 2Africa should be working in 2023, or 2024.