In 2026, we are obsessed with scale.
We are told that if our work does not reach millions, it does not matter. We chase the viral hit. We obsess over global trends. We design our lives, businesses, and ministries to appeal to a faceless, international audience. We want to be everywhere at once.
However, in our relentless pursuit of breadth, we have lost our depth.
We have forgotten the power of local relevance.
We live in a strange paradox. We are hyper-connected to the entire world but increasingly disconnected from the street we live on. We know exactly what is happening in the White House, but we do not know the name of the man who sells bread at the junction.
This disconnection is not just a social problem; it is a strategic failure. It is the reason businesses fail, creative projects ring hollow, and our political engagement feels like screaming into a void.
When I look at the creators and leaders who are actually making a dent in the world, whether in Lagos, London, or a secondary city like Ogbomoso, they rarely start by trying to conquer the globe. They start by mattering deeply to a specific group of people in a specific place.
They understand a fundamental truth: You cannot be significant to everyone if you are not significant to someone.
The Illusion of Global Concern
To understand why local relevance is so difficult, we have to look at how we consume information. We suffer from a collective illusion that awareness equals impact.
Nowhere is this more evident than in our political discourse.
Scroll through the Twitter timeline of the average Nigerian intellectual or politician. You will see passionate, well-researched takes on the geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe. You will see hot takes on the US elections, with detailed analyses of Donald Trump’s policies versus the Democrats. You will see sorrowful posts about the crisis in the Middle East.
These are important issues. But notice the silence that follows.
The same politician who issues a press release about global peace will often stay silent when their own constituency has been without clean water for three months. They will offer sophisticated commentary on international trade tariffs, but have no coherent plan for the bad roads that are destroying the local market in their district.
And before we judge the politicians too harshly, let us look in the mirror.
As citizens, we are guilty of the same escapism. It is intellectually safer to worry about Donald Trump than it is to worry about President Tinubu or your local Local Government Chairman.
Why? Because Donald Trump cannot hurt you. He cannot arrest you. He cannot send thugs to your shop. Criticism of a distant leader is a performance of virtue. It costs you nothing.
But engaging with local relevance? That is dangerous. That requires skin in the game. Asking why the budget for your local primary school was looted requires a level of courage that tweeting about American foreign policy does not.
We use global concern as a shield to hide our local cowardice. We feel productive because we have an opinion on a global scale; meanwhile, our immediate environment, the only place where we actually have the power to change things, rots away.
This is the trap of the modern age. We are citizens of the internet but refugees in our own neighbourhoods.
Why Silicon Valley Strategies Fail in Lagos
This lack of local relevance is not just a political issue; it is a business killer.
In my work with brands, I constantly see companies trying to deploy global strategies in a local context without adjusting for reality.
They read a case study about a startup in San Francisco and try to replicate it in Ibadan, forgetting that the environment is fundamentally different. This is a failure of contextual intelligence.
The Mobile Trends Fallacy
For example, a web design agency might obsess over high-definition video backgrounds because that is the trend in New York. But if your primary customer is a trader in Lagos using a mid-range Android phone with a patchy data connection, that global trend is actually a user experience disaster.
The video won’t load. The data will burn. The customer will leave.
By trying to be globally impressive, you became locally irrelevant. You designed for a user who does not exist in your market.
The Shift to Niche Creators
Smart brands are already waking up to this reality. For years, the strategy was to pay a celebrity with 10 million followers to hold up a product. But the data shows that this approach is failing.
According to recent marketing studies, micro-influencers (those with 10k to 100k followers) generate up to 60% higher engagement rates than macro-influencers or celebrities. Furthermore, 61% of consumers say they find “people like me” to be more credible than celebrities.
Why is this happening? Because a celebrity offers reach, but a niche creator offers local relevance.
If you are selling a skincare product for the humid Nigerian weather, a recommendation from a beauty blogger in Yaba who actually deals with that humidity is worth infinitely more than a recommendation from a movie star in a controlled studio. The audience trusts the blogger because she shares their context. She shares their struggle.
The celebrity has fans. The local creator has a community. In 2026, the community is the most valuable asset.
The Real Estate Reality
The same applies to industries like real estate. You cannot be a global real estate agent. Real estate is the ultimate hyperlocal game.
A generic lead generation strategy might tell you to run broad Facebook ads. But a strategy built on local relevance tells you that in Nigeria, trust is low and verification is everything. A locally relevant agent doesn’t just post pictures of houses; they post videos proving the road is accessible during the rainy season. They understand that the pain point of their customer isn’t just price; it is the fear of buying a property that is under government acquisition.
Addressing these specific, unglamorous, local fears is what builds trust. And trust is the currency of local relevance.
How Ennovate Lab Changed the Narrative
If you want a masterclass in grassroots innovation and the power of blooming where you are planted, look no further than Ennovate Lab in Ogbomoso.
For years, the narrative in the Nigerian tech ecosystem was singular: If you want to succeed, you must move to Lagos. Lagos was the centre. Lagos was the hub. Every other city was a wasteland.
This created a massive brain drain. Talented young people from university towns across the country felt they had to abandon their communities to find relevance.
But the team at Ennovate Lab challenged this assumption. They decided to build a world-class innovation hub, not in Yaba, but in Ogbomoso, a secondary city often overlooked by investors.
They did not try to be Lagos. They focused on solving local problems unique to their environment. They leveraged the massive student population of LAUTECH (Ladoke Akintola University of Technology).
They built local relevance by asking, “What does Ogbomoso need?” Rather than “What is cool in Silicon Valley?”
The result? They’re transforming Ogbomoso into a thriving secondary city for tech talent. They have proved that you do not need to be in the capital to be a capital city of innovation. By going deep into their specific location, they are attracting global attention.
This is the paradox of hyperlocal strategy. By ignoring the pressure to move to the centre, they became a new centre.
The Philosophy of Depth vs. Width
Why do we struggle with this? Why is the Ennovate Lab story the exception rather than the rule?
It is because we have confused width with impact.
We think that to be successful, our branches must reach as far as possible. We want followers in different time zones. We want clients in different currencies. But in nature, a tree that grows wide branches without deep roots is the first one to fall in a storm.
Local relevance is the discipline of growing your roots down before you grow your branches out.
In Your Career
When you focus on depth, you stop being a commodity. There are a million web designers on the internet. But there are very few web designers who understand the specific logistics challenges of eCommerce businesses in Chicago.
By narrowing your focus to a specific place or problem, you increase your value. You become the expert. You become the go-to person.
In Your Creative Life
There is a saying in writing. The universal is found in the specific.
Many writers try to write for a global audience by stripping away all their cultural markers. They remove the Nigerian slang. They hide the specific details of their environment. They try to sound neutral.
The result is bland, corporate, AI-sounding text.
Great art is unapologetically local. Think of Chinua Achebe. He did not write Things Fall Apart to please a reader in London. He wrote it to capture the specific reality of the Igbo people. And because he was so deeply, authentically local, the entire world resonated with it.
We see the same thing with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. She did not shy away from the gritty, specific details of the Biafran war or the nuances of Nsukka university life. She dove into them. That specificity is exactly what made the book a global masterpiece. It felt real because it was rooted in a real place.
Don’t try to write for the global citizen. Write for the person sitting next to you in the danfo. If you can make them feel seen, you have achieved authentic connection. That is the power of local relevance.
In Your Personal Impact
We often suffer from empathy fatigue because we worry about problems halfway across the world while ignoring the needs in our own home.
We see this in the parent who is a hero on social media, fighting for justice in distant lands, but is a stranger to their own children. This is a failure of local relevance.
True impact starts in your Circle of Control. It starts with intentional parenting. It starts with being a good neighbour. It starts with solving the problem that is right in front of your face.
How to Build Local Relevance in a Distracted World
So, how do we push back against the tide? How do we stop being global tourists and start being local leaders?
Here is a practical framework for building community impact and depth in 2026.
1. Audit Your Attention Diet
Where does your information come from?
If 90% of the news you consume is about America or Europe, you are voluntarily colonising your own mind. You are filling your mental RAM with data you cannot act on.
Make a conscious effort to consume local news. Read blogs about your city. Follow journalists who cover your state. Join the community WhatsApp group you usually mute. You cannot solve problems you do not see.
2. Solve a Boring Problem
Global problems are sexy. Climate change, AI ethics, space travel… These are exciting topics to discuss at a dinner party.
Local problems are usually boring. They are dirty. They involve potholes, waste management, primary school literacy, and inconsistent power supply.
But these boring problems are where the real value lies. If you can build a solution for waste management in your specific estate, you have done more for humanity than the person who wrote 50 tweets about the dangers of AI.
Grassroots innovation is almost always unglamorous. It requires you to get your hands dirty.
3. Build Thick Communities
The sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom, talks about the difference between thin and thick institutions.
Social media is a thin community. It is broad, fast, and low-trust.
Your local church, your residents’ association, your professional guild… these are thick communities. They are messy, slow, and require negotiation. But they are high-trust.
To build local relevance, you need to invest in thick communities. You need to show up in person. You need to sit in meetings that drag on too long. You need to deal with difficult people. This friction is what creates the bond.
4. Adapt Global Best Practices to Local Reality
This is for the professionals. Whether you are in SEO, branding, or manufacturing, your job is to be the bridge.
Don’t just import a strategy. Translate it.
- Global Best Practice: Optimise for voice search.
- Local Translation: Optimise for how Nigerians actually speak and search, which might involve Pidgin or specific local slang.
- Global Best Practice: Automate customer service.
- Local Translation: Nigerians value respect and human connection. Maybe we should use automation for efficiency, but keep a human layer for trust.
This ability to translate the global into the local is the most valuable skill you can possess in the coming decade.
Small is the New Big
There is a peace that comes from embracing local relevance. It liberates you from the anxiety of trying to be famous. It allows you to focus on being effective.
We are entering an era where the idea of the global village is fracturing. Trust in global institutions is collapsing. People are looking for leaders, creators, and businesses that understand their specific reality.
They are looking for you to be relevant here.
Whether you are building a brand strategy, writing a book, or raising a family, the goal is the same. Don’t worry about how far your reach extends. Worry about how deep your roots go.
Because when the storms come, and in Nigeria, the storms always come, it is not the widest tree that survives. It is the one with the deepest hold on the ground.
Stop trying to save the world. Start by fixing your street.
How are you practising local relevance in your work or life today? Are you guilty of worrying about Trump while ignoring your local chairman? Let’s have an honest conversation in the comments.
