She Turned Down a UK Tech Visa to Stay in Lagos. Now She Earns $4,800 a Month and Hasn’t Left.

In 2022 she had a Global Talent Visa offer from a London fintech. She turned it down. She’s still in Lagos, earning more than the UK salary would have been, and thinking she made the right call — most days.

This product manager requested anonymity. Income and savings figures have been verified. Employer identities and specific personal details have been withheld at her request.

Tell us who you are — without telling us who you are.

I’m a Yoruba woman, thirty-four. I grew up in Ibadan, did economics at one of the federal universities, pivoted into product management after two years working in operations at a Nigerian e-commerce company. By 2021, I was a senior PM at a Lagos-based fintech doing insurance infrastructure — embedded insurance for banks and telcos. It’s a niche that sounds boring and is actually interesting if you care about financial inclusion, which I do.

How did the UK offer come about?

A London fintech reached out on LinkedIn. They had a senior PM role for their African expansion team — which was ironic, because they wanted someone who understood African markets to help them expand into African markets from London. The pay was £72,000 — about $90,000 at the time. The Global Talent Visa route was available because I had a portfolio of work that qualified under the Tech Nation criteria. The company was prepared to support the application.

At the time I was earning ₦650,000 a month in Lagos. At the exchange rates of early 2022, that was about $1,450 a month. So in raw numbers: £72K versus $1,450/month. It looked like an obvious decision from the outside.

Why did you say no?

Several reasons, but I’ll be specific so this is actually useful to someone reading it.

First: the UK job was their “African expansion” team. I’d interviewed enough to understand this meant I would spend the next two years explaining Africa to people who had read about Africa. I’ve done that work. It’s exhausting and often thankless, and the product decisions still go wrong because the people with sign-off power have never lived the reality.

Second: my mother had just been diagnosed with something serious. Not terminal, but serious. I am her only child. The idea of being in London trying to navigate NHS waiting times and flight prices every time she needed something was — I just couldn’t do it. Some people have families that make leaving easier. Mine made it impossible.

Third, and this one I feel more comfortable saying now than I did then: I believed that remote work at dollar rates from Lagos was achievable. Not immediately, but within two years. I’d started seeing a handful of Nigerian product people make that transition. I decided to bet on myself to get there faster than the timetable on a UK salary would have allowed — because London cost of living would have eaten most of that £72K.

How did you get to the dollar income from Lagos?

It took about eighteen months. I spent six months doubling down on my work in Lagos — shipped two major features, got a promotion to Principal PM, raised my salary to ₦1.1 million. Then I started applying for remote roles with US and European companies that had African operations or expansion interests. I positioned myself specifically as someone who could build products for African users — not someone who needed to be taught African market context but someone who could teach it.

I got my first remote contract — a six-month engagement with a UK-based impact fintech — at $3,200 a month. I kept my Lagos job for the first three months, running both in parallel. It was unsustainable. I quit the Lagos job in month four. Then the contract converted to a full-time remote role at $4,200 a month. I’ve since moved to a different company and I’m on $4,800 a month now.

So what does the money situation look like?

$4,800 gross. My company pays into a USD account — I use a fintech that gives me a foreign account number, then I convert to naira when I need naira. At current rates, that’s roughly ₦7.6 million a month. I’m strategic about when I convert — I don’t convert everything at once, I hold some in dollars as a hedge.

My rent is ₦1.4 million a year for a two-bedroom flat in Lekki Phase 1 — split across two payments. Monthly equivalent is about ₦117,000. Food and domestic expenses: around ₦200,000 a month. I have a driver three days a week: ₦80,000. I support my mother’s medical costs — about ₦150,000 a month on average, higher if she has a procedure. My church commitments. Savings: I’m putting $800 a month into a dollar investment account and ₦500,000 into a Nigerian treasury bill position.

What I spend in a month in Lagos — probably ₦900,000 to ₦1.1 million depending on the month. What I earn: roughly ₦7.6 million. The gap is meaningful. That gap doesn’t exist at £72,000 in London after rent and taxes.

What’s hard about this setup?

Several things. My company is US-based. My core working hours are supposed to overlap with US Eastern time. That means I’m in meetings until 11pm or midnight on some days. Not every day — but enough days that my social life is structured around it. I’ve missed more than one friend’s birthday dinner because of a US product sync that ran late.

There’s also the isolation of remote work. In a Lagos office, there are people. There is noise. There is the shared irritation of NEPA and the shared relief when the generator kicks in and someone brings suya on a Friday. Remote work from home in Lagos is just… me, my laptop, my VSAT internet connection, and a WhatsApp group for the team that operates on US time zones.

And the professional visibility problem is real. I’m not in the room. When promotions happen, I have to fight harder to be seen because I’m not there building the daily relationships that make people think of you when opportunities open. I know I’m good at my job. But goodness needs an audience to become advancement.

Do you think you made the right call?

On money: yes. Definitively. I earn more than I would have in London, I live more comfortably than I would have in London, and I’ve built savings in a way that would have been impossible on £72K in London with London rent and London lifestyle costs.

On everything else: I genuinely don’t know. My mother is still here. She’s doing better. I was here last September when she had a scare at 2am — I got in a car and was at the hospital in forty minutes. If I’d been in London, that would have been a different kind of night entirely.

What I’ve given up is the experience of having been somewhere. My friends who went abroad have a texture to their lives — they’ve navigated foreign bureaucracies, made friends across cultures, built identities that aren’t rooted only in Nigeria. There is something in that I’m aware I don’t have. Whether it would have been worth the trade-offs — I can’t run the counterfactual.

What do you tell friends who are thinking about leaving?

I tell them to do the actual math, not the aspirational math. Calculate what you’d net after UK or Canada or Germany taxes and rent. Research the cost of your specific lifestyle in that city. Then compare it to what you could realistically earn in dollars or euros remotely from Lagos — not what some LinkedIn influencer claims to earn, but what the job boards actually show for your level.

For some people the calculus clearly points to leaving. For some it clearly points to staying. For a lot of people it’s actually closer than they think, once you run the real numbers.

And never, ever make a major life decision based on exchange rates. The naira rate you’re looking at today is not the naira rate of two years from now. Plan accordingly.

Regrets?

I regret that I don’t have a second passport. That’s the honest answer. The money is fine. The life is good. But the freedom to leave quickly if things deteriorate — that’s the thing I think about. Not because I want to go. Because I want the choice.

Left Nigeria for a tech role abroad? Or stayed when everyone expected you to leave? Share your #TechJapa story at betar.africa/techjapa. We protect your identity and verify your figures.