Awesome Akinfenwa is a full-stack developer from Nigeria and founder of TechAid Connect, a nonprofit connecting technical volunteers with organizations that need them.
In the Speaker Accelerator program, we chatted about the many talk topics he could present. He went off and thought about it, and came back with this piece of brilliance.
He calls himself an “edge case,” and he’s making the case for why that shouldn’t mean being an afterthought at checkout.
In his own words:
The Edge Case Is a Person: What Widely-Used Tools Get Wrong About Users They’ve Never Met
We keep building tools for a global audience as if access is universal. It isn’t.
My nonprofit in Nigeria, TechAid Connect, qualified for Anthropic’s nonprofit discount on Claude: $16 for two seats. By the time the payment cleared my card and converted, it cost nearly 24,000 naira. It was a real discount from someone who never had to ask what a dollar becomes once it crosses a border.
Working from Nigeria, I’ve hit the same wall in three shapes: a price, a postcode, a verification form. None of them meant to exclude me. Two cost me time and money that the next person was never billed for. One cost me the job. Every time, I was somebody’s untested edge case.
If you build or recommend tools for people you’ll never meet, this talk is for you.
You’ll leave with three questions. Each one would have caught one of these before it shipped.
Bio:
Awesome Akinfenwa is a full-stack developer and the founder of TechAid Connect, a platform connecting nonprofits with technical volunteers. He has spent four years building with PHP, WordPress and WooCommerce. He started TechAid Connect in 2024 to make it easier for nonprofits to find technical help and for developers to find work worth doing. Running it from Nigeria taught him something else: the tools built to help are usually priced, verified and designed for somewhere else.
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