In Nigeria, online generosity has a familiar choreography. A creator announces a giveaway. The replies fill with phone numbers and bank details. Someone opens a spreadsheet. Someone else starts making transfers one by one. What is meant to feel generous can quickly become an administrative job. Mayowa Sunusi thinks that job should disappear. He is the technical founder behind Ridim, …

He was supposed to be a doctor. “Life got real,” Mekitmfon Herbert Awakessien says, in the flat, amused tone of a man who has told this story before. “My fingers touched the keyboard, and they never wanted to touch an injection or a test tube again.” That single swerve from medicine to computer science is the smallest of the redirections …