By Babajide Aguda
When conversations about Nigeria's technology ecosystem take place, attention often gravitates towards Lagos, Abuja, and a handful of other established hubs. Yet innovation has never been confined to a single city, and over the past few years, a growing movement in Cross River State has been working to prove exactly that.
At the centre of that movement is the Tech Conference Calabar the biggest tech conference in the ancient city of Calabar, organised by Calabar Tech Community and convened by Amani Kanu aka the Tech Evangelist alongside co-founders Florence Egwu, Grace Effiong, and Bassey Archibong. What began as a community-driven effort to connect technology professionals, entrepreneurs, students, and innovators has evolved into one of the most significant technology gatherings in Southern Nigeria. Its growth reflects the broader journey of the Calabar Tech Community itself, which started in 2021 as a WhatsApp group of five members and has since grown into a thriving network of over 1,000 tech professionals across developers, designers, founders, and aspiring professionals.
Creating space for Technology conversations
Tech ecosystems do not grow through infrastructure alone. They grow through people. They grow when developers meet mentors, when founders find collaborators, and when students encounter opportunities that expand their ambitions. Creating those connections has been one of the central goals of Calabar Tech Conference since its inception.
The 2025 edition, themed "Innovating for Growth: Building the Future of Technology in Cross River and Beyond," ran across two days on the 5th and 6th of December. Day one was held virtually, drawing over 300 attendees from across Nigeria and beyond for a full day of sessions on AI, design, product development, blockchain, and career growth. Day two brought the event to City Church Tent in Calabar, where over 450 participants showed up in person. Across both days, the conference recorded close to 750 participants from 992 total registrations, and it was free for every single attendee.
A significant highlight was the attendance of the Honourable Commissioner for Science, Technology and Innovation in Cross River State, Justin Beshel, whose presence reinforced the state government's interest in the region's growing tech movement. The conference brought together professionals from across the technology industry for discussions spanning software development, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, product design, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, robotics, blockchain, and career development. For many attendees, particularly students and early-career professionals from Calabar, it was the first time they had access to conversations of this quality without travelling to a larger city.
Building opportunities beyond the stage
One of the distinguishing features of Calabar Tech Conference is its emphasis on practical impact, and the 2025 edition delivered this in several ways.
The Calabar Build Hackathon, themed "Build for Calabar. Solve Local. Win Global," was one of the most energising elements of the event. Teams competed to build technology solutions addressing everyday challenges in Cross River State, pitching their products to a panel of judges before the finals were held live at the physical event. The ideas that came out of the room were genuinely impressive, spanning waste management, cross-border payments, housing, agricultural e-commerce, drug discovery, student marketplaces, and a smart digital companion for the Calabar Carnival. The hackathon prize pool stood at 1,000,000 (one million) naira, with winners announced and celebrated on the day to considerable excitement from the crowd.
Beyond the hackathon, the conference delivered tangible resources directly to attendees. 15 (Fifty) participants received free YES Africa IT training. 20 (Twenty) businesses walked away with Perplexity Pro subscriptions. Canann Impact Initiative who was a major sponsor provided a laptop giveaway. Swag, workshops, and a high-energy networking after-session rounded out two days that felt less like a formal conference and more like a community finally getting the platform it deserved.
The event attracted backing from organisations including Sessionize, Tech4Dev, Women Techmakers, Bridge Foundation, RemoStart, Canann Impact Initiative, Footprint, Guru Innovations Hub, Zigatext, Hakeela, D’roid technology and SPE Technologies, with community partners including GDG UniCross, Web3 Calabar, Hack51 Africa, Unical Radio, and Techvantage. That a first-edition conference in Calabar drew this range of support speaks to both the strength of the organising team's network and the genuine appetite that existed for something like this to happen.
Building towards the future
The case for holding a conference of this scale in Calabar is stronger than most people outside the region realise. The city has a population of over 1.2 million, five or more universities, over fifty tech startups, and an internet penetration rate of roughly 65 percent. There is a growing base of tech professionals, a government with stated interest in digital transformation, and a geographic position that makes Calabar a natural gateway between southern Nigeria and Central Africa.
What the city lacked was not foundation. It lacked visibility, and events like Tech Conference Calabar exist precisely to change that. As the conference continues to grow, its impact will likely be measured not only by attendance figures or speaker line-ups, but by the careers launched, partnerships formed, startups created, and communities strengthened as a result of the conversations it helps bring to life.
The ambition is not to keep Tech Conference Calabar local. The plan is to grow it into a global series with editions in Lagos, London, and beyond, building a movement anchored in a city that most of the world's tech industry has not yet paid attention to. Given how quickly the first edition came together and what it delivered, that ambition does not sound unreasonable.
For Calabar's growing technology ecosystem, that may prove to be its most important achievement.
Photos: TECH CONFERENCE CALABAR 2
Trailer: https://youtu.be/tckIhqfSYYo
Full video: https://youtu.be/CvckfFef8M0
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