Let's face it, there is a lot of money to be made abroad, especially by the Nigerian coder who is confident with his skills. The upside is that you can still earn good income freelancing from Nigeria, earning in dollars and without huge tax and other costs of living that eats up your money as a professional living abroad. But the greatest downside always is how do you get paid? Finding the work is only half the problem; getting paid might be harder.

As a web programmer temporarily living in the UK as a student several years back I worked on several projects in the UK and US as a freelancer. transactions were straightforward because I either got paid by bank transfer or Paypal. Relocating to Nigeria at the expiry of my visa, however, gave me huge challenges. First, I could no more operate my UK bank account as a non-resident and my regular clients declined to pay by Paypal. Again they didn't want to be bothered to make a bank transfer to Nigeria for this and that reason. To make matters worse, I soon found it impossible to smoothly operate my Paypal account anymore since it was opened with expired UK credentials. The alternative of opening a Paypal account from Nigeria made no sense because PayPal offered no way to withdraw my money to a local bank account. In any case, Paypal is never the best way to give your client confidence that you are not a fly-by-night operator. Nevertheless the short of it is I was screwed, and so I an easier solution to receive my online earnings whenever I could get a client. That is how I ran into a global payment service called Payoneer.

Opening an account was not so rigorous, but needed my credentials to be checked and also that I nominate a local Nigeria bank account to receive my money. I used Access and the process cost me no money at all. The first test was that payment of nearly 2000 pounds stuck for several months with a client landed in my account in my Nigeria account in less than 2 weeks after my UK account was opened by Payoneer. And as I mentioned, from my experience most international companies don’t want to deal with paying internationally, so this alternative service allows freelancers like me to minimize the stress on those companies by providing means of paying a local bank account. What happened was that the service enabled my new international clients to make payments into my local receiving account in their local currency, which went directly to my Payoneer account. What I am saying is if I freelance for a UK firm, they pay into my UK bank account, if I freelance for a US firm, they pay into my US bank account and if I freelance for a European firm, they pay into my Europe bank account - all of those accounts are set up by Payoneer. And from there I am able to withdraw directly to my Nigerian bank account. It has been a dream come true.

Letting me withdraw money from my Payoneer account right to my local bank account is one of the best features of the service. But it soon got even better; using the Payoneer Prepaid Mastercard, I able to withdraw my money from any ATM around the world and in-store or online, which means I can avoid my Nigeria bank's typically high transaction fees and caps on spending. With Brexit opening up more avenues for brilliant Nigerians and with COVID now making remote working attractive to most hi-tech companies, I don't think this should be a bad year at all for the good IT freelancer or for that matter anyone at all selling any goods and services from Nigeria.
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