How a startup built Nigeria’s  digital map in nine months

In the months before the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the world, Taslim Salaudeen, a Nigerian-based geospatial innovator, found himself confronting a difficult patch. After a string of failed ventures—Agromini, an agritech company founded in 2015, and Upnepa, an energy startup launched in 2017—he began to question whether entrepreneurship still held a future for him.

The repeated failures had taken a toll on him. For a moment, Salaudeen considered abandoning startups altogether and finding a conventional job, like paid employment. But instead of quitting, he paused to reflect on a simpler question: what did people consistently come to him for?

The answer was geography, how man understands earth’s landscapes and peoples. “I asked myself what people loved me for the most,” he told TechCabal in a telephone interview in March 2026. “It was geography. I studied it, I loved it, and I could explain complex things about the world to people easily.”

That realisation became the seed for what would eventually become Milsat Technologies, a Nigerian data infrastructure company that built a mapping tool capable of digitally mapping the entire country in just nine months.

A country that needed mapping

Accurate geospatial data is critical to modern governance. From census planning to infrastructure development, taxation, disaster response, and elections, governments rely on precise digital maps to understand where people live and how communities are structured.

In Nigeria, however, building this foundation has been a persistent challenge. The National Population Commission (NPC), which is responsible for conducting national censuses, has spent more than two decades trying to implement a fully digital mapping system.

The agency’s first major shift away from analogue methods came during the 2006 census, when it used Global Positioning System (GPS) and high-resolution satellite imagery to create geo-referenced Enumeration Area (EA) maps. Despite this progress, data collection remained largely manual, relying on paper-based Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) forms.

By 2014, the NPC expanded its digital efforts by introducing Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and launching the Enumeration Area Demarcation (EAD) project, an ambitious plan to map every building and boundary across the country. Although originally scheduled for completion within three years, the project stretched to seven years due to delayed and insufficient funding. The digital mapping of all 774 Local Government Areas (LGAs) was finally completed in 18 phases in 2021. 

The scale of the task has been a major constraint. Nigeria’s vast and diverse landscape, spanning dense urban centres, remote rural communities, shifting administrative boundaries, and areas with limited connectivity, has made comprehensive digital mapping difficult. Traditional tools have struggled to keep pace with this complexity.

“They had been trying to do digital census mapping for more than two decades,” Salaudeen says. “But the tools available were built for countries that are structured differently.”

Most global mapping software assumes stable infrastructure, strong internet connectivity, and relatively uniform settlement patterns, conditions that do not always apply in Nigeria or many African countries.

For Salaudeen, the problem revealed an opportunity.

Building a tool for African realities

The breakthrough began with a simple principle: rather than adapting foreign tools to local conditions, you need to build a system designed specifically for them.

Salaudeen said he began researching the problem in 2017 while exploring potential work with the NPC. At first, the commission described its need as faster map printing. But deeper conversations, he said, he had with the NPC revealed a more fundamental challenge.

“They didn’t actually need faster printing,” he explains. “What they needed was a digital system that allowed them to map the country more efficiently.”

That insight became the starting point for Milsat’s first product.

Salaudeen spent roughly a year researching the realities of mapping in Nigeria, studying terrain, workflows, and the daily challenges faced by field enumerators. He travelled across the country observing how data collectors worked in both cities and remote regions.

What he saw shaped every feature of the system.

“If someone said they worked for an hour and their data got deleted, the next version of the system saved automatically every second,” he says. “Every feature we built came from a real complaint in the field.”

The result was a mobile mapping application designed to operate under conditions common across much of Africa.

According to Salaudeen, the app worked offline, consumed minimal storage, and could run on basic smartphones. Even users with little technical training could operate it.

Most importantly, it offered extremely high location accuracy—what Salaudeen describes as “99.9% precision.”

Designing such a system was technically demanding. But Salaudeen built the first version himself.

“I wrote the system end-to-end at the beginning,” he says. 

Mapping Nigeria in nine months

Once the first version of the tool was completed in 2019, Salaudeen noted that it was tested in collaboration with the NPC. Field teams from the NPC, alongside personnel from other ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs), he added, were trained and deployed to begin data collection.

Using the geospatial mobile and web application, these teams, according to him, digitally mapped Nigeria’s landscape, capturing buildings, roads, rivers, settlements, and administrative boundaries. The first nationwide deployment followed in 2021, with about 10,000 field agents participating in the exercise.

The scale of the task was immense. With hundreds of thousands of settlements and one of the largest populations in the world, accurately mapping Nigeria requires extensive coordination across field enumerators, supervisors, and multiple government institutions.

Using the new tool, teams were able to digitise the entire country in just nine months.

“They mapped buildings, roads, rivers, every piece of infrastructure—even down to settlement boundaries,” Salaudeen says.

For a process that had stalled for more than two decades, the turnaround was remarkable.

The project demonstrated that locally designed geospatial technology could outperform imported solutions when built with local realities in mind.

The five pillars of data collection

The mapping tool was only the beginning. From the start, Salaudeen envisioned Milsat not as a traditional software company but as a data infrastructure platform. To achieve that, the company developed what it calls the five pillars of data collection.

The first pillar, according to him, is human fieldwork. Over 50,000 trained agents travel door-to-door collecting precise location-based information, from property details to demographic data.

The second pillar involves Internet of Things (IoT) devices that collect continuous environmental data in places where humans cannot reliably operate. These sensors can measure variables such as temperature, soil conditions, and water levels in real time.

The third pillar is drone mapping. When terrain becomes inaccessible for both humans and sensors, drones can capture high-resolution aerial imagery.

The fourth pillar, for him, is satellite remote sensing. Through partnerships with satellite providers, Milsat can analyse large geographic regions from space.

The final pillar involves geospatial intelligence, combining and extrapolating existing data to generate new insights.

Together, these systems allow the company to gather location-based data from almost anywhere.

“Our goal is that if you ask us for data about any location, we can collect it,” Salaudeen says.

Managing thousands of field agents

One of the most complex aspects of the system is managing the human workforce involved in field data collection.

Salaudeen noted that Milsat has worked with more than 50,000 field agents over time, with roughly 10,000 active workers available when needed. Most of them treat the work as a side job.

“They have their main jobs,” Salaudeen explained. “When we need them, we bring them up to speed.”

Ensuring data quality across such a large network requires sophisticated oversight. The mapping application tracks the device, the worker’s location, and the area assigned to them. If an enumerator is not physically within the designated zone, the system detects it.

Supervisors with local knowledge then review submitted data to ensure it aligns with reality.

“For example, someone who knows the community might say there’s no way 700 children live in that neighbourhood,” Salaudeen added.

Combining automated tracking with human verification creates a multi-layer quality control system designed to produce reliable datasets.

Milsat has deliberately grown without traditional venture capital, funding itself primarily through paid customer projects rather than external equity. Salaudeen, wary of investor pressure to chase rapid growth or trendy sectors like fintech, has relied on revenues from private companies and occasional government collaborations to develop new tools. This self-funded approach has allowed the company to scale steadily, reaching over ₦1 billion ($736,372) in annual revenue by 2025 while remaining fully profitable. Valued between $10 million and $50 million, Milsat has avoided outside investment, with Salaudeen describing it as a “camel” rather than a “unicorn”—a company built for endurance, not quick exits. 

“We’re building something that could last 50 or even 100 years,” he says.