Solomon Kershima Yateghtegh received the Benue Youth Innovator Award on Wednesday at IBB Square in Makurdi, where the Benue State Government marked International Youth Day 2026 in front of a crowd the organisers put at more than 2,000 young people. Deputy Governor Engr. Sam Ode represented Governor Rev. Fr. Chief Dr. Hyacinth Iormem Alia at the event, with the award presented by Chief Hon. PST Ojotu Ojema. For Yateghtegh, founder and CEO of SKYHub Nigeria, it’s a state-level nod to a bet he made five years ago that most people building careers in Nigerian tech don’t make: moving toward a smaller market instead of away from one.
Why Benue, Not Lagos
In 2021, Yateghtegh relocated SKYHub from Jos to Makurdi — not because Jos’s tech scene was thriving and he wanted more of it, but for close to the opposite reason: he saw even less structured tech activity in Benue and decided that was exactly where a training and innovation hub was needed most. It’s a deliberately contrarian move in a country where digital-economy attention, capital, and talent concentrate overwhelmingly in Lagos and, to a lesser degree, Abuja. Building a hub in North Central Nigeria instead meant slower going and a smaller immediate market — but it also meant SKYHub had far less competition for the region’s attention, and far more room to become the default place a young Benue resident goes to learn a digital skill.
What SKYHub Has Actually Built
Five years on, that bet has produced real numbers. SKYHub says it has trained more than 10,000 individuals in digital skills, supported over 1,500 businesses, and incubated 12 startups out of Makurdi — a track record that has drawn in partners like UNDP Nigeria and linked the hub into federal programmes such as 3MTT, Nigeria’s national digital-skills initiative. Benue State’s own digital-transformation push has grown alongside that work; the state now runs a dedicated Benue Youth Startup and Innovation Support Portal as part of a broader effort to formalise support for young entrepreneurs and innovators — infrastructure that didn’t really exist in the state when Yateghtegh first arrived.
The Long Road Before the Award
The recognition follows a harder-won credential Yateghtegh picked up last year. In 2025, after collecting rejection emails from multiple fellowship and programme applications in quick succession, he was accepted into the Mandela Washington Fellowship — one of the most competitive professional exchange programmes the US State Department runs for young African leaders — and spent several weeks studying business at the University of Iowa before returning to Makurdi to keep building. It’s the kind of persistence that tends to sit quietly behind a single line on an award citation.
A Personal Footnote
The timing carried extra weight for Yateghtegh personally: Wednesday’s ceremony fell on his father’s birthday, and he drove from IBB Square straight to his family home to hand over the award in person. Writing about the moment afterward, he kept the framing forward-looking rather than celebratory: “This award is not the destination. It is another reminder to keep working.”
Why It’s Worth Noting Beyond Makurdi
State governments recognising individual tech founders isn’t a new format, but it matters more in places where the tech-ecosystem story has almost entirely been told through Lagos, Nairobi, and Cairo. Yateghtegh’s award is a small, local data point in a larger and still-underreported trend: digital-skills infrastructure is slowly taking root in parts of Nigeria that rarely feature in continental tech coverage, often because one person decided an underserved region was the opportunity, not the obstacle.
