Digital Nomads: Olayinka Oke saves $368 monthly to live in three countries a year

Digital Nomads: Olayinka Oke saves $368 monthly to live in three countries a year

Olayinka Oke has travelled to 23 of Nigeria’s 36 states, exploring her nomadic curiosities from humble beginnings before she began branching out of the country and, eventually, Africa.

Before Ghana, Malta, Sierra Leone, and Kenya, there were shorter trips across Nigeria. She would wait for a public holiday, take two extra leave days, book a hotel or Airbnb, and disappear for four days. Sometimes, it was a quick weekend stop in Ekiti, in southwestern Nigeria. Other times, Kano, in the far north.

At the time, international travel still felt distant for Oke.

But in 2017, she crossed Nigeria’s borders for Accra, Ghana, for the first time. That trip changed something.

“Even though Ghana is a lot similar to Nigeria, there was—I don’t know the word for it—but my eyes just opened to the fact that there’s actually a lot more to life than the country where you live,” said Oke.

Now, she saves a little over ₦500,000 ($368) every month into a travel fund to finance the frequent travel lifestyle she describes as requiring “meticulous planning.”

In March, she was in Kenya for the month, working remotely from different high‑brow parts of Nairobi and taking a side trip to Lamu, off Kenya’s coast. Later this year, she plans to visit several European countries and at least one Asian country, preferably Thailand, she said.

Oke, a chemical engineering graduate from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) in Ogbomosho, Oyo State, leads data management and governance at Nigeria LNG Limited (NLNG), one of the country’s biggest gas producers.

She said her urge to travel came from a restless dislike for routine and a desire to keep experiencing new places instead of staying in one environment long enough to get bored.

“There’s always the point of wanting to be in a saner clime,” Oke said. “Every time you run into a low‑quality problem in Nigeria, you tell yourself that, ‘if I were living outside Nigeria, this wouldn’t be a problem.’”

Her full‑time job is based in Nigeria, but over the last few years, she has steadily built a life that assumes she will live in at least three other countries every year, one month at a time.

Oke first worked in the oil and gas sector, including a stint at Halliburton, the multinational oilfield services firm with operations in Nigeria, between 2014 and 2016.

She then moved into banking as a data professional at tier-2 lender, Union Bank, from 2016 to 2021, before transitioning fully into the energy side of data, first at Easy Solar and now at NLNG.

Oke traces her deliberate nomadic life to two moments: that first Ghana trip and later, a job that pushed her to move to Sierra Leone. For a while, the change showed up mainly as tourism. She travelled when she could afford it, mostly for short stays.

The shift from tourist to temporary resident came in 2022, when she got an offer from Easy Solar. The company sells renewable energy products to last‑mile users on a pay‑as‑you‑go (PAYG) basis in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

She said she started as a commercial data analyst, working remotely at first, but the role came with a condition: at some point, she would have to move to Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone.

“I eventually moved to Sierra Leone in 2023,” she said. “Sierra Leone is not like Europe, which is a lot more developed; in fact, I would say Sierra Leone is a bit less developed than Nigeria, but the way things were just different was very interesting to me.”

While she spent about a year in Sierra Leone, the stay was long enough for daily details to matter more than the idea of “moving abroad.” The first shock came from housing and groceries.

Rents in the parts of Freetown where expatriates and professionals clustered were quoted in dollars, and her two‑bedroom apartment, shared with a flatmate, cost about $600 a month. Groceries, too, were often more expensive than she expected, partly because many products were imported, she said.

Food and convenience became the biggest pressure points. In Lagos, Oke prefers to order almost everything online and can go weeks without leaving her house when working remotely.

In Freetown, that setup simply did not exist. There were restaurants with Instagram pages, but no central food‑delivery platforms, she said.

She had to ask colleagues how people managed. Eventually, she settled into the local workaround: finding a trusted bike rider who acted as a personal dispatch, buying items from different places, and bringing them over.

In the middle of her Sierra Leone stint in 2023, she applied on LinkedIn for a data analyst role at a Malta-based gaming company.

She got the offer while she was still with Easy Solar, and kept working for the company as the Malta process moved ahead.

Oke left Sierra Leone around June and returned to Lagos, continuing to work remotely for Easy Solar until it was time to travel. In September, she flew to Malta to start the in‑country stages of her new role.

She said the gaming company sponsored her visa, paid for her flight, and put her up in a hotel for the first two weeks while she looked for an apartment.

The Maltese visa system, she explained, works in stages: on arrival, a new employee gets an approval in principle and a tourist visa to enter the country, and the actual work permit only comes after medical tests, a registered address, and a stack of documentation.

Before she could clear all those requirements, she had to return to Nigeria to deal with a personal matter. She did not complete the work‑permit process and never formally resumed at the Maltese gaming company.

“It was a difficult decision to make, definitely, because I had been trying to leave Africa for quite some time, and it was a good opportunity, seeing that it was through a sponsored job,” Oke said. “But then, it was a sacrifice that I had to make, and it was a difficult decision, but I made it anyway.”

She used the remaining time on her entry visa to stay in Malta for six weeks before coming back to Lagos. She did not resign from Easy Solar until she got her job with NLNG in December 2023.

“The job that I got after I came back is fantastic. The career that I’m building is fantastic as well,” she said. “So I don’t have any regrets about coming back.”

Oke’s senior data role at NLNG enables her to afford a travel lifestyle; she was clear-eyed about that.

Every month, before anything else, she removes a fixed amount from her income and moves it into a dedicated travel fund held in US dollars.

She chose dollars because travelling almost always costs in dollars, and she did not want her plans to erode every time the naira moved, she said.

“The fixed amount that I put into that fund every month is a little over ₦500,000 [$368],” she said. “And if you put a little over ₦500,000 [$368] in 12 months, that comes to between ₦6 million and ₦8 million [$4,416–$5,888].”