The question nobody asked, but everyone needed to hear.
I don’t have to know every line of code to be part of the tech world. I woke up in Lagos before 6 am, just like I do every day. As soon as I unlocked my phone, I found myself scrolling through WhatsApp. I sent a voice note to my hair vendor, sent an Opay transfer, and quickly hopped onto Instagram to post randomly. By 7 am, I realized I had engaged with technology more than most people do in an entire day.
But if you asked me if I was a tech person, I probably would have laughed it off and said no, that’s not me. I’m not the coding type.
Then I remembered Wisdom’s words: “Aunty, you use WhatsApp to price Wigs from your supplier in Aba. You are already doing tech.” That phrase made me stop mid-sentence, and honestly, it should do the same for many of us.
There’s something people don’t talk about when they mention entering the tech space. They forget that even those running tech hubs once felt just like me, intimidated and excluded, convinced it was all meant for someone else. Kenny articulated this feeling perfectly on the Samic Podcast: “The word tech used to intimidate me. When people said I work in tech, I assumed it meant something I could never do.” She described the image many of us carry: someone with three laptops, eating at their desk, coding for hours on end. But Kenny didn’t stay outside that door. She walked through it, and now she talks about tech as if it were always hers. That shift from being intimidated to belonging is exactly what this is about.
Then I discovered Canva and started designing. When someone recognized my work and said, “That’s a tech skill,“ it was like a lightbulb went off. Wait, that counts? Yes, it counts. It always has. We just didn’t say it out loud.
Wisdom had a different journey. She didn’t just discover a tool; she found representation. A woman who looked like her, thriving in the tech world. Suddenly, the atmosphere didn’t feel so closed off. Representation isn’t just a buzzword; for some of us, it’s the key to entering a space that once seemed completely inaccessible.
Let’s take a moment to walk through my actual morning. It’s not just theory; it’s real life.
My alarm goes off. Clock app? That’s tech. I check Instagram before my feet even hit the floor. That’s tech. I sent a WhatsApp voice note to my customer. That’s tech. I ordered Item 7 via OPay transfer. That’s tech. I open my notes app to plan my day. That’s tech. And it’s not even 9am yet.
So, at what point in the day do we stop using tech? If you drive a car, you don’t say you’re not a car person just because you didn’t build the engine. You don’t need to know every line of code to be part of the tech world. You don’t need to build algorithms to benefit from them or belong to the community. The girl running her fashion business from her phone? That’s tech. The woman keeping track of her Ajo contributions in Excel? That’s tech too. The market woman using WhatsApp video calls to price goods with her supplier? Yep, that’s tech.
Tech is already woven into everything. We just aren’t used to calling it that.
Maybe that’s the first and most crucial shift we need to make. Not learning an entirely new skill or enrolling in a bootcamp, but simply claiming what is already ours.
So here I am. Tech isn’t some foreign language for geniuses. It’s my alarm, my OPay, the Canva designs I create, the WhatsApp groups I manage, the reels I edit on CapCut, and the Google Forms I share with clients. It’s been mine all along.
But if that’s true, and if I’m already using tech, then when did I first become a tech person? I think it was sometime before 6am, on an ordinary morning in Lagos, before I even had the language for it.
The door was never locked. I just needed someone to tell me I’d been walking through it all along. So consider this me telling you. You’re already in. You always were.
Now I’ll ask you what I had to ask myself: when did you first recognize yourself as part of the tech world? You might be surprised by your own answer. Drop it in the comments, I’ll be reading every single one.
And if your answer makes you want to go further, Samic Workspace is ready for you with free resources, good people, and a learning environment built for exactly this kind of beginning.