On December 31, 2015, Joshua Chibueze saw a viral post: a woman had broken her kolo, a local wooden savings box, to show what she had saved.
Chibueze’s first thought was his own savings. He saw the post as a fix for his problem and wanted to try it himself. “I wanted to actually save by all means,” he recalled in an interview at the Lagos office of the wealth management company he co-founded, PiggyVest.
He was 23 and, like most of his friends at the time, broke. “How can you go an entire year and you have nothing to show for it?” he said. “You want to buy rice and oil for your parents at the very least.”
He ordered a kolo from an online vendor to start saving himself. On January 1, 2016, he tweeted, “It’s only natural to think about an online solution for this piggybank idea, but then you have to really understand how Nigerians think”. It was the first time the idea went public.
Originally published by TechCabal.