Gibbous Moon Over Lagos

A cracking and insightful read about doing business for good in Africa’s newly emerging giant economy and megacity, Lagos, Nigeria. Lagos, Nigeria, a city of about 20 million people (no one knows exactly how many) is growing fast and it is not the same Africa as that of the open plains of the Serengeti or the thunderous white cloud of Victoria Falls. This is Africa’s wild side, a place where ethics can be lost and where enormous good can be done; it is where Africa’s future will be made. In 2005, Australian Pamela Watson, a one-time intrepid cyclist who peddled her way solo across Africa turned Lagos-based businesswoman, embarked on a thrilling five-year entrepreneurial journey. It included the highs of creating a successful hand-made paper social enterprise and making a difference to an embattled community, and the lows of discovering the human cost of a corrupt system and anxiety over the integrity of those she believed shared her business dream.  This original story explores whether Lagos’s gibbous moon is waxing to full or waning back to the dark side, and what happened to Pamela’s own cycle of business adventures. Along the way, we gain rare insight into this megacity of contradictions— as open as it is opaque, as full of opportunity as it is of hazards, as exciting as it is frustrating. What becomes clear is that effervescent, hard-working, self-aware and brutally self-critical Lagosians are determinedly chasing dreams and opportunities in this untamed urban environment.