A public framework for verified opportunity data.

I grew up in Ibadan, Nigeria, where economic uncertainty was never an abstract subject. You see it in the choices families make, the opportunities people cannot reach, the businesses that remain small despite years of effort, and the amount of human ability spent simply trying to stay afloat.

Community also shaped my own life in a very direct way. After an early family loss changed our circumstances, extended family, religious communities, scholarships, mentors and later professional collaborators repeatedly opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed. That experience left me with a lasting belief: access can change the direction of a life, but access must be organized, trustworthy and able to reach people at the moment it is needed.

My medical training taught me to look beyond isolated symptoms. The human body works because specialized parts remain connected by structure, circulation, signalling, feedback and protection. A system may possess resources and still fail when those resources do not reach the right place, when signals arrive too late, or when there is no reliable way to distinguish healthy information from harmful noise.

Over the past several years, I have also had the privilege of working as an independent WooCommerce engineer and technical partner to businesses in different countries. Much of the work happened behind the scenes: repairing broken store functions, extending plugins, connecting systems, improving checkout or fulfilment, and translating a business’s specific operational problem into working software.

That experience showed me what practical access to technology can make possible. It also taught me why ownership matters. WordPress and WooCommerce allow businesses to build on open-source foundations, combine the work of a global community, retain meaningful control over their data and content, and adapt their systems as their needs change.

As AI began to change routine software work, I faced a choice. I could spend my energy defending an old role, or I could test what a small team with domain expertise, open-source software and responsible AI could now build. ATTEMT was created from that decision: to keep serving businesses commercially while using ATTEMT Digital Lab to investigate practical local problems, build controlled proofs, and share what we learn.

Nigeria’s enterprise base made the first problem difficult to ignore. According to the 2020 National Survey of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises conducted by the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria and the National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria had an estimated 39,654,385 MSMEs as of December 2020. Micro enterprises accounted for 38,413,420, or 96.9 percent of the total, while small and medium enterprises together accounted for 1,240,965, or 3.1 percent.

Although these are survey-based estimates rather than a live count, they show that Nigeria’s enterprise base is overwhelmingly concentrated among its smallest businesses. These businesses are not a minor edge of the economy. They are livelihoods, local services, employers, family support systems and potential producers operating in communities across the country.

Yet the opportunities designed to support them are often fragmented across websites, documents, social platforms, announcements, physical offices and informal networks. An opportunity may exist, but the intended business may not find it, may not know whether it is current, may not understand whether it applies to its location, or may not be able to distinguish an official programme from an unsupported claim.

EagleScope began with a question: what would a geographic, evidence-led connective layer for opportunity look like?

In the model we are testing, geography provides structure. Programme data creates visible pathways. AI helps us search farther, extract and organize information, and reduce the cost of working across large information spaces. Communities contribute missing records, corrections, local context and source evidence. Human review and source verification determine what earns public trust.

AI expands reach. People provide context. Verification protects trust.

We are beginning with Business Empowerment Programmes and Oyo State. This is not because one platform can solve Nigeria’s economy. It is because meaningful systems are built by defining a real problem, beginning somewhere specific, testing honestly, measuring what happens and improving from evidence.

The Oyo pilot is intended to show what the framework can and cannot do: whether legitimate opportunities can be mapped more clearly, whether public contribution can expand coverage safely, whether verification can improve confidence, whether SMEs can be guided toward appropriate digital support, and whether local talent and institutions can participate in a more measurable operating loop.

The experiment is still young. We will get some things wrong. We will discover gaps we did not anticipate. We will publish what we can responsibly share, protect what must remain private, and keep improving the framework as evidence develops.

To everyone who has contributed a source, correction, skill, introduction, conversation, criticism, collaboration or word of encouragement: thank you. Community has repeatedly expanded opportunity in my own life. EagleScope is one attempt to build that principle into a public system—while ensuring that verification protects the credibility on which the system depends.

The problem is shared. The learning should be shared. The opportunity to build something useful should be shared too.