From playing Solitaire on a desktop in the late 1990s to studying Computer Science and now building a Pan-African job platform, Ogugua Belonwu’s journey into technology began with curiosity and evolved into a mission to transform how Africans find work.
What began at newspaper stands under the hot sun has evolved into a digital workforce solution with over a million monthly users.
In this edition of After Hours, Belonwu shares his journey from scanning newspaper job listings to building MyJobMag.
Early interactions with technology
I often trace my relationship with technology back to junior secondary school. During one of the holidays, I attended a computer training programme where we were introduced to basic office tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and others. At the time, everything felt mysterious. I didn’t fully understand how it all worked, but I was fascinated.
After the training, I convinced my dad that we needed a computer at home. This was in the late 90s when laptops weren’t common. We bought a desktop: a big monitor with a CPU sitting on the floor. That became my first real interaction with technology.
I loved it instantly. Not just because it was new, but because I could do things others around me couldn’t. I played simple games like Solitaire and helped people type documents. I saved my files on floppy disks, took them to cyber cafés to print, and sometimes even made a little money doing basic computer tasks for people.
It was also something to brag about back then, being one of the few kids in my circle who knew how to use a computer.
When the time came to choose a career path, the decision felt almost natural. Medicine was never an option for me; I couldn’t stand blood, and hospitals made me uncomfortable. My dad and I used an elimination method while filling out my JAMB form. We ruled out healthcare, considered engineering, and then landed on computer science.
My dad often said, “Computers are the future,” and I believed him. I chose computer science and never regretted it.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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After university, I got a teaching job while waiting for my youth service. My first salary was ₦25,000, barely enough to get by, let alone buy a computer. I borrowed another ₦25,000 from my school principal and bought a second-hand Compaq laptop, which people today would recognise as an early version of a Lenovo ThinkPad.
That laptop was my baby. I used it until it finally gave up.
From newspaper stands to MyJobMag
The idea for MyJobMag came from a simple habit my dad instilled in me while I was in university: reading newspapers.
He always talked about “Tuesday and Thursday Guardian.” At first, I thought it was a joke. But those were the days when The Guardian published job adverts.
After school, I continued the routine. I would go to newspaper stands, buy a copy, and go home to read comfortably. But I noticed people standing in the sun, flipping through papers because they couldn’t afford to buy them. Some even built relationships with vendors who allowed them to skim through for a small tip.
At some point, it struck me: this entire process could be moved online.
I already had some web development training, so I told my sister that I was starting a business. I bought a scanner with OCR (optical character recognition), scanned job pages from newspapers, converted them to text, cleaned them up, and uploaded them online.
That was how MyJobMag began.
In the early days, we didn’t have the money to pay for expensive tools. So we got creative.
Before platforms like Firebase became popular, we wanted to send real-time notifications to users about new jobs. Emails were slow, SMS was expensive, and we didn’t have a mobile app yet.
So we built our own push notification system using browser notifications. We created a queue management system that handled message delivery, retries, and expiration, something that today you’d use tools like RabbitMQ for.
We also built our own crude email system when we couldn’t afford services like SendGrid or Mailchimp. Our server sent emails directly, tracked bounces, and managed delivery responses. People were shocked when I told them we ran emails from our own server without getting blocked by Gmail or Yahoo.
Eventually, we moved to proper tools, but those early creative solutions helped us survive and grow at almost no cost.
Building Africa’s workforce
The original goal of MyJobMag was simple: stop people from standing under the sun flipping through newspapers for job listings.
I can confidently say we solved that problem.
But now, we’ve moved to a bigger vision: building Africa’s workforce, one country at a time.
We want MyJobMag to become the go-to platform for hiring African talent across Nigeria, East Africa, Southern Africa, and the diaspora. Beyond being a job board, we’re working on community features, assessments, and AI-driven tools to make talent discovery easier.
We recently incorporated in the UK to help businesses outsource African talent. Companies paying £2,000 to £4,000 for services in the UK can get equally skilled professionals in Africa at lower costs, while Africans earn a good income by local standards. It’s a win-win.
Our responsibility is to support these talents properly, ensuring stable internet, good communication, and reliable systems.
Everyday life with technology
Today, technology is at the centre of everything I do. Sometimes so much that I worry about it. I joke that when I retire, I might just start a poultry farm and spend my days with chickens and birds.
But for now, every day revolves around building MyJobMag. I wake up thinking about how to improve the platform, what new features to build, how to debug code, how to drive traffic, and how to market better online.
My phone has become a constant communication tool. People talk about staying off screens for mental health, and while I understand it, technology has become deeply embedded in how I work and function daily.
Collaboration tools like Google Docs and Google Sheets are essential for my team. They allow us to work together in real time, track progress, and move faster.
In terms of communication, WhatsApp has surprisingly become the app I use the most. I used to resist it for professional work. I believed corporate communication should stay on email or Slack. But now, everyone uses WhatsApp for both work and personal conversations, and honestly, if you take it off my phone today, communication would slow down drastically.
On the infrastructure side, we rely heavily on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our emails, notifications, and many of our services run on it. If AWS ever stopped working or doubled its prices, we would be in serious trouble.
I’m what I call “passively active” on Twitter (or X). To keep up with what’s going on in the industry, I follow tech blogs, founders, and platforms that talk about technology.
I read global tech news and source platforms like Techpoint Africa for local updates. I also subscribe to newsletters from interesting companies to stay up to date on product updates and trends. It’s about keeping my ears on the ground.
One of my biggest frustrations with technology today is unnecessary complexity. I strongly believe in the “KISS” principle: Keep It Short and Simple.
I love tools that solve one problem clearly and intuitively. When I have to jump through ten steps just to do something simple, I usually leave unless the solution is absolutely necessary. I think in the rush to be trendy, many platforms sacrifice simplicity. But great design should make things effortless.
I use LinkedIn for prospecting, Twitter for research and news, but not much for personal communication.
At some point, I took a break from social media. There was a time I felt myself getting sucked into endless scrolling. I even installed an app that blocked social media from 8am to 5pm. But eventually, I realised blocking completely wasn’t the solution. I needed better discipline.
I adopted the Pomodoro technique: 25 minutes of focused work, five-minute breaks. It helped me manage distractions while still using social media when necessary.
Technology has definitely made communication faster for me, but social media hasn’t really changed how I interact with people.
I’m a private person. I prefer one-on-one conversations over group chats. If I need to tell three people something, I’d rather message them individually than drop it in a group and wonder if they saw it.
If I had the chance to improve one area of tech, it would be cloud infrastructure. Platforms like AWS are powerful, but I believe they could be much simpler and more user-friendly, especially for young companies that end up adopting technologies that aren’t right for them.
I’ve seen startups get hit with massive bills after cyberattacks due to poorly configured systems. Some woke up owing thousands of dollars overnight. Infrastructure should protect users better and be easier to understand.
Challenges building MyJobMag
One of our biggest challenges has been funding. MyJobMag is fully bootstrapped. That makes growth slower and mentally demanding.
We’ve expanded into Kenya, where we’ve become one of the top job platforms in terms of traffic. We also operate in South Africa, with around 100,000 monthly users there. Across all platforms, we see over one million unique users monthly, with Nigeria accounting for about 600,000 to 700,000 of those.
With funding, we could scale faster, hire more people, invest in marketing, and expand more aggressively.
Right now, I still act as both product manager and project manager in many cases, simply because we can’t afford to hire for every role yet.
The future of technology in Africa
I’m optimistic about Africa’s tech future, but I also have concerns.
We’ve made impressive progress in financial technology. People in villages now have bank accounts, POS services, and mobile money apps.
I believe job search will also evolve, moving away from heavy offline processes to more digital platforms.
But for technology to truly thrive, infrastructure and education must improve. Stable electricity, reliable Internet, and strong education systems are the foundations of innovation. Without them, growth slows. When there’s no power, productivity drops instantly. It’s hard to build anything meaningful when your environment doesn’t support it.
Africa has brilliant minds; we see them excelling abroad, but many leave because the system back home makes it difficult to experiment and build.
In the next five to ten years, I hope to see stronger investments in education, better infrastructure, and gradual adoption of advanced technologies like AI, even within universities.
