Central Bank of Nigeria · via Ideosphere Limited · July – November 2021 · Brand Communications · Website Content · Screenplay · Crisis Communications
The eNaira was discontinued in 2024 by Nigeria's new administration. The website is no longer live. What you are reading is a record of what was built, why, and how — at a moment when Nigeria became the first country in Africa to launch a Central Bank Digital Currency.
When the project first came in, my reaction was more pensive than excited. I had been in enough rooms where government-adjacent projects dissolved before they started. Projects with parastatals had a tendency to materialise spectacularly or not at all. So when I heard what was on the table — the full brand identity, resource website, and initial communications for Nigeria's CBDC — I began quietly preparing for the work rather than celebrating the prospect of it. By the time the award letter arrived, the window for excitement had passed. I was already in project-design mode.
What replaced the excitement was curiosity. Nigeria was building something that had no real African precedent. The CBN was not just launching a product — it was attempting to shift how a nation of over 200 million people thought about money, transactions, and trust in a financial system many of them had reason to distrust. That was the problem space I was entering as a writer.
"My knowledge of Web3, cryptography, and blockchain at the time was entirely surface. There was no commercial AI to aid learning. Everything was hands-on and page-turning."
Before a single word of content could be written, I spent weeks reading. I requested and received several documents and project files from the CBN — technical specifications, project briefs, design documents prepared with the companies providing the CBDC technology. I had to understand the concepts thoroughly enough to then translate them for an audience of everyday Nigerians, many of whom had never interacted with a digital wallet. The research ran parallel with the project's architecture phase — sitemaps, wireframes, user stories — and continued all the way through to handover, because new nuances about how users would interact with the eNaira kept surfacing throughout.
The hardest section to get right was the FAQs and explainer content. The challenge was not finding the information — it was finding the language. Technical accuracy mattered, but so did accessibility. You cannot explain a CBDC to a Lagos market trader using the vocabulary of a Fintech whitepaper. You have to understand it completely, and then translate it into the curiosities and anxieties of the actual public.
There is a common simplification in how I describe this engagement: that I wrote 'the script for the eNaira launch ad.' The fuller picture is that there were two distinct screenplays, each requiring its own creative logic.
The first was a dramatised advertisement — human-centred, shot across two real locations (a market and a home), designed to warm Nigerians toward a technology they had every reason to be sceptical of. The CBN had, at the time, placed heavy restrictions on crypto platforms, which meant the eNaira's message needed to be carefully positioned — not as a replacement or a capitulation to crypto culture, but as a protective, regulated alternative from a 'big brother' institution that cared about its people. That was the tone I aimed for: warm, familiar, caring — the opposite of corporate. This screenplay went through three drafts. On shoot day, adjustments were still being made for lighting, sound, and location logistics. The actors who appeared in the ad were the same people who modelled for the website's photography, which meant I also prepared and managed both the model contracts for the photoshoot and the actor contracts for the ad.