Interviews

Funke Opeke is the founder and CEO of MainOne, a leading telecommunications and network solutions provider across West Africa, with headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria. Following a $320 million acquisition in 2022, MainOne now forms part of Equinix – a US-based digital infrastructure company. Opeke begins the interview by reflecting on her upbringing in Western Nigeria, where she recalls attending a girls’ secondary boarding school that spurred her interest in electronics and electrical engineering. After obtaining her bachelor’s in the subject, she speaks about her decision to pursue an MS in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University during the 1980’s. Addressing her positionality as a Black woman in a program that was mostly male and white, she contends that she “was just in there like anybody else. We were all young people trying to discover and create the best opportunities for ourselves. I was going to compete with everyone.” Opeke also explains how over the course of her Master’s, she started considering how the technological expertise she was acquiring could be applied in Nigeria.

After graduate school, Opeke pursued a 20-year telecommunications career in the US, first working in start-ups such as SendMail and later becoming Executive Director of Verizon Communications’ Wholesale Division. Then in 2005, Opeke describes a turning point in her life when she moved back to Nigeria to become the Chief Technical Officer of MTN – the South African-based mobile network provider that had only been in the country for five years and was expanding rapidly. Speaking about her choice to move back, Opeke explains that “when the MTN opportunity came up, I could apply the knowledge I had gained over the years working in the private sector in the US and also have the opportunity to make a difference in Nigeria and the continent.” She also describes the challenges, as she moved from an environment with deep institutional knowledge to one where she would need to pioneer innovative methods to deploy existing technologies in the context of Nigeria.

After leaving MTN in 2006, Opeke assisted with the privatization of NITEL – Nigeria’s former monopoly telephone service provider. Seeking to transform the organization from the inside, she speaks about encountering a depth of corruption which prevented her and the organization from making the difference she had envisioned. Rather than return to the US, Opeke at this stage decided to employ the skills and experience she had gained to found her own company with Main Street Technologies (MainOne today) in 2008. She explains the process of obtaining funding from organizations such as the African Development Bank for her new company’s major infrastructure project – a 7,000-kilometer undersea high-capacity cable that stretched from Portugal down the coast of West Africa. Completed in 2010 and costing $240 million, Opeke outlines the myriad of challenges faced during construction, from obtaining permits to traverse different countries to securing debt financing. She also discusses the jobs that the undersea cable and MainOne have created for Nigerians. In addition to direct employees working in technical positions, she identifies how MainOne has created even more jobs indirectly by providing the digital infrastructure that local technology companies needed during the 2010’s in order to prove their business models and scale. Opeke cites companies such as CcHub or Andela as ones that MainOne worked with to provide the fast connectivity that would allow for expansion.

Opeke concludes the interview by addressing MainOne’s recent acquisition by Equinix, expressing how “being tied into that global ecosystem seemed to be the best route to ensure the long-term sustainability and growth of what we had built.” For that reason, she notes how she did not view it as a difficult decision, but rather as a necessary one. In closing, Opeke also summarizes some lessons she has learned over the course of her careers in the US and Nigeria, arguing that she has “done more to pull down barriers to achieve what we needed to more-so than do any fundamental innovation, invention or acquired state-of-the-art knowhow.” This involves innovating context-specific processes to deliver the digital infrastructure needed in order to bring about further technological advancements in Nigeria.

 Close