Gibbous Moon Over Lagos is about the highs and lows of doing business in Lagos, Nigeria's megacity in Africa's newly emerging giant economy.
Lagos is a city of about 20 million people and is growing fast. This is a place where ethics can be lost and where enormous good can be done; it is where Africa’s future will be made.
Pamela Watson, a one-time intrepid cyclist who peddled her way solo across Africa, embarked on a thrilling five-year entrepreneurial journey in Lagos in 2005. While running a successful hand-made paper social enterprise, she navigated the city's bewildering scale and complexity and experienced first hand the devastating human cost of its often corrupt system.
Gibbous Moon Over Lagos explores whether Lagos’s gibbous moon is waxing to full or waning back to the dark side — whether young, entrepreneurial Nigerians can succeed in a city with yawning social inequality — and details what happened to Pamela’s own cycle of business adventures. Along the way, we gain rare insight into this megacity of contradictions — as full of opportunity as it is of hazards. What becomes clear is that the effervescent, hard-working and brutally self-critical Lagosians are determining chasing dreams in this untamed urban environment, regardless.
Gibbous Moon Over Lagos is a timely and inspiring read for those keen to know an Africa that challenges old stereotypes.