Agboola Joshua: The boy who refused to wait

There is something about Agboola Joshua that stays with you. He is not a household name in the way that politicians or entertainers are. He does not have a stadium full of people chanting his name. What he has is something rarer a story of a child who looked at the world and decided, without hesitation, that he belonged at the front of it.

Joshua started writing code at the age of six. Not as a school project. Not because someone told him to. He did it because something in him pulled him there. By the time most children his age were learning to read chapter books, Joshua was working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Java, C++, and more. The list of languages he has built capacity in reads less like a child’s hobby and more like the portfolio of a seasoned developer.

He grew up in Nigeria, in Lagos, a city that does not slow down for anyone, and perhaps that energy found its way into him. His father, an engineer, noticed what his son was building and encouraged him to go further. That encouragement mattered. Behind every record Joshua has broken, there is a family that believed in him before the world did.

In February 2023, at the age of thirteen, Joshua sat for the Amazon Web Services Certified Cloud Practitioner examination and passed. He became the youngest Certified Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner in Africa. But he did not stop there.

Barely four months later, he sat a two-hour examination that tested his skills in deploying, troubleshooting, and development on the AWS cloud platform and emerged the youngest Certified AWS Developer Associate in Africa.

Then came another first. In 2023, he sat for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate examination and passed, another record for Africa.

When asked what drove him to pursue these certifications, Joshua did not speak about trophies. He said cloud computing had become one of the defining technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and its importance became visible to him while working on an Artificial Intelligence project. He was thirteen. He was working on an AI project.

Joshua is also the founder of Joshfortech, a venture that provides knowledge and skill empowerment services, as well as web and mobile application solutions to businesses and individuals. Through his YouTube channel under the same name, he teaches technology skills in a way that is easy to follow, because he understands that access to knowledge changes lives.

He has not kept his story to himself. Joshua broke a record by becoming the youngest keynote speaker at the ICTEL Expo of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry in July 2019, a first in the Chamber’s 131-year history. He has since spoken at conferences including Techpoint, the Swiss Cognitive Commonwealth Conference, and the Rise Network Conference. He has appeared on TVC News, Channels TV, AIT, NTA, and in publications such as BusinessDay and Vanguard.

In 2024, Tech Unite Africa named him Tech Entrepreneur of the Year, a recognition of his contributions to the technology space. The previous year, he received the Early Achievers Award at the closing ceremony of the 2023 National Children Leadership Conference.

At sixteen, Agboola Joshua is still at the beginning. And that, perhaps, is the most powerful thing about his story.