Diaspora at Work: Naijaborn.com co-founder Francis O. Oghuma

A couple of weeks ago, I was I had an email correspondence with Francis O. Oghuma, one enterprising Nigerian, and co-founder of Naijaborn, a social network dedicated to the vibrant Nigerian diaspora community. He recently emailed us that NaijaBorn has surpassed 1,500 members in it’s public beta. No word yet on when the site will be out of public beta, but if you are Nigerian or a friend of Nigeria and culture, “show ya sef” at Naijaborn and get an account!

Hi could you tell me a little bit more about Naijaborn?
Naijaborn hosted on naijaborn.com is a nigerian social platform that helps connect and expose nigerians to other nigerians and friends of Nigeria. The platform is a viral approach to exposing what nigerians are capable of doing to the whole world in a clean, easy to use and well branded platform.

How was Naijaborn started? What motivated you to start the service?
NAIJABORN started cause we cudnt find a uniform voice or a particular platform that connects nigerians and spread d naija good news. Mainly because Nigerians are everywhere and we believe creating a virtual online place for them to connect with motherland in a professiional way

Who is your target market?
Our primary target is Nigerians world wide and secondary market is friends of Nigeria and business men who wish to do business in Nigeria with Nigerians.

How many members do you have so far registered?
Our public beta already has 1,500+ members and we are increasing daily.

What’s Naijaborn’s mission?
Mission of Naijaborn is to connect Nigerians globally and expose their works to the rest of the world.

What kinds of services are you planning on offering through Naijaborn?
We plan to offer music and other works of arts distribution on naijaborn, branding and marketing solutions, business solutions in forms of Business to Business and Business to Consumer solutions.

What goals are you trying to accomplish with this service?
We wish to create an easy to use platform for Nigerians and people interested in Nigeria and its people. We are working hard to create a database of 100 million+ nigerians and friends, that will host talents, businesses, brands and all sort of applications; to mine the data and get usefull information about the Nigerian people.

And finally, how do you hope this will impact Nigeria?
The platform will help to rebrand the image of Nigeria and let the world get to know more about Nigeria other than what they currently know about the great nation.