Nigerian shoemaker trained in Italy builds West Africa's safety footwear leader

Yinka Atunde, a computer science graduate, abandoned his tech career and travelled to Italy for shoemaking training before returning to Nigeria to establish what Business Insider Africa describes as West Africa's largest safety footwear company. The founder has raised $1.5 million in funding and now produces shoes at scale after beginning with just 20 pairs.

Atunde's trajectory—from tech to factory apprenticeship in Italy, then manufacturing in Nigeria—reflects a pattern the Marche region knows well. Italy's shoe and leather districts have long drawn foreign entrepreneurs seeking hands-on training in production, design, and supply-chain management. Marche's own shoe cluster, centred on the Pesaro-Urbino area and the Macerata province, remains a destination for this kind of knowledge transfer, even as the global footwear market fragments and competition from low-cost producers intensifies.

The story also touches on a broader shift in African manufacturing. Rather than outsourcing to Asia or relying entirely on imports, entrepreneurs like Atunde are building domestic capacity, often by acquiring skills and networks from established industrial districts in Europe. Italy's reputation for craftsmanship and its willingness to host foreign apprentices—despite economic pressures on its own firms—continues to seed entrepreneurship across the Mediterranean and beyond.

For Marche's shoe manufacturers, now grappling with rising labour costs and competition from Southeast Asia, Atunde's success carries both a lesson and a reminder: the region's real asset is not cheap labour but accumulated expertise, design capability, and the ability to innovate in materials and processes. Entrepreneurs from Nigeria to Vietnam recognise that value enough to travel to Italy to learn it.