I Spent a Year Building a Summit. Here’s What It Taught Me About Nigeria’s Green Future.
I don’t usually write about my day job on here. But something happened last week that I can’t stop thinking about, and I think it matters beyond Abuja, beyond Nigeria, maybe even beyond Africa.
On June 17 and 18, 2026, the Nigeria Environmental Summit (NESt) took place at the Abuja Continental Hotel. The theme was Unlocking Nigeria’s Green Economy. About a year of my life went into making it happen.
I want to tell you what that year looked like, what the summit was really about, and why I think it connects to conversations a lot of you are already having.
The year before the room fills up
Most people see a summit and think: speeches, panels, badges. They don’t see the spreadsheets.
Over the past year I’ve been serving as Secretary and Digital Communications Officer at the Nigerian Environmental Summit Group (NESUG), the public-private consortium that runs NESt annually. That title sounds clean. The reality was thousands of registrant records to deduplicate, DNS configurations for our mailing domain, QR-coded access passes, meal tickets, name tags, coordinating with UN agencies, chasing partnership letters to organisations like Lafarge Africa and GIZ, and nomination campaigns for the Nigeria Environmental Hall of Fame.
There were also things I genuinely hadn’t done before. I built AI-powered web apps (a Green Economy Oracle and a Green Future Pledge Generator) deployed on Vercel, running on the Anthropic API, for a live five-minute demonstration slot at the summit itself. A year ago I wouldn’t have known how to do that. Now I do.
That’s the part that sits with me. Not just what we built for the event, but what the event built in me.
What “green economy” actually means in Nigeria
I want to be honest about something. “Green economy” can sound like a phrase invented in a boardroom somewhere in Geneva to make wealthy countries feel better about their emissions. In Nigeria, it means something different and something more urgent.
Nigeria is the most populous country on the continent, a major oil producer, and simultaneously one of the countries most exposed to the effects of climate change: flooding in the south, desertification creeping down from the north, energy poverty affecting hundreds of millions of people. The tension at the heart of NESt is real: how do you build an economy that lifts people out of poverty without repeating the extractive mistakes of the last century?
The conversations at NESt 2026 weren’t abstract. We had policymakers, private sector players, NGOs, development finance institutions all in the same room. The question being asked, not just on panels but in corridors and over lunch, was: where is the actual investment going, and who does it reach?
That question doesn’t have a clean answer yet. But the fact that it’s being asked seriously, publicly, with receipts, by Nigerians in Nigeria, is itself significant.
What actually happened in that room
NESt 2026 ran across two full days. The programme covered green financing, renewable energy policy, sustainable agriculture, and waste management, with sessions designed to move beyond diagnosis and into action.
NESUG itself is worth understanding. It’s not a government agency and it’s not a typical NGO. It sits deliberately in the space between public institutions and private sector interests, trying to hold both accountable to the same long-term agenda. That structure gives it unusual credibility and unusual pressure. When a development finance institution and a federal ministry official are both in the room, you can’t afford to be vague.
What struck me most wasn’t any single speech. It was the density of the network in that hotel. People who had only emailed each other for months shaking hands. Implementing partners comparing notes. Young environmental professionals watching how the senior figures navigated disagreement. That’s what a summit actually produces not a communiqué, but a living document made of relationships.
A year on, and what comes next
I reflected publicly after NESt 2026 wrapped up, there’s something bigger underneath it.
Nigeria’s green economy transition is real, it’s underway, and it’s being shaped right now by the people willing to show up and do the unglamorous work the spreadsheets, the DNS records, the partnership letters that never get replied to, and the ones that do. NESUG is one of the institutions trying to make that work count for something. NESt is where it surfaces once a year.
I’m proud I was part of it. And I’ll be back next year with considerably less imposter syndrome.
Ishaku Happy is an editor in cheif for The Third Half