Beyond the Stripe Gateway: How to unlock the Nigerian diaspora wallet

What does a communications professional know about global expansion? Enough to tell you that your strategy is probably wrong.

You think winning over the “diaspora market” means adding a Stripe gateway, maybe translating your website, and suddenly Nigerians in London will start paying in pounds. I’m sorry, but that’s not global expansion. That’s naive optimism with a payment processor.

The diaspora isn’t just “Nigerians abroad with more money.” They’re not a monolith. They’re a complex, segmented audience with distinct emotional needs, identity ties, and trust barriers that have nothing to do with exchange rates. What you need isn’t just a better payment infrastructure. You need what I call Cultural Translation.

So, what is cultural translation, and how do you actually do it?

Understanding the diaspora market

I’m not going to bore you with a textbook definition of “diaspora market.” You know what it is. What you probably don’t know is how badly you’re misreading it.

Here are the numbers that should matter to you: over the past decade, remittances to Africa have doubled, reaching $100 billion in 2022. That’s more money than the continent gets from Official Development Assistance or Foreign Direct Investment. Specifically, Nigerians abroad send around $20bn back home every year.

And yet? Most Nigerian tech products capture almost none of it.

Why? 

Because you’re treating “diaspora” like it’s one homogeneous group sitting in different time zones, when it’s actually four psychologically distinct segments that require completely different strategies.

The four segments (and what they actually want)

Harvard Business Review researchers Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp identified a framework that’ll save you months of trial and error:

The dead ends (skip these):

1. Marginals: Their purchasing decisions are driven by affordability, functionality, and durability. Culture? Not a factor. These aren’t your customers. Move on.
2. Assimilators: They’re actively buying host-country products to prove they belong to their new culture. They’re consciously moving away from home-country brands. You’re fighting uphill here. Deprioritise.

The Goldmine (focus here):

3. Ethnic affirmers: Every purchase filters through “does this affirm my ethnic identity?” Loyal, premium prices, but they socialise within their own communities. Great for revenue, limited for reach.
4. Biculturals: Your goldmine. Strong ties to both cultures. They code-switch culturally, appreciate authentic home-country products, AND introduce them to mainstream audiences. Bridge customers with social capital in both worlds.

If you’re building for diaspora, you’re building for Ethnic affirmers and Biculturals. Everyone else is noise.

…And what they actually want:

These groups lean towards products that create emotional connections through “nostalgic consumption” (maintaining continuity with “home”) and “identity affirmation” (expressing cultural identity in host contexts). The best diaspora products do both—they trigger nostalgia while affirming contemporary identity.

And here’s the beautiful part: they’re willing to pay premium prices for it. Not because they have more money, but because when you’re geographically separated from your culture, consumption becomes identity work. When Nigerian fashion brand Dye Lab brings their hand-dyed agbadas to diaspora pop-ups in Chicago, Houston, and London, customers aren’t just buying clothes, they’re buying wearable cultural artefacts and identity markers worth premium prices.

But that premium only activates when you demonstrate cultural understanding. Add a Stripe gateway to a generic product? And you get standard conversion rates. Add cultural translation? You unlock the premium. You unlock sales. You unlock the diaspora wallet.

How do you activate that premium willingness? Here’s where cultural translation comes in.

What is cultural translation?

Cultural translation is the process of understanding the nuances, traditions, and values that shape how people interact with a brand. It’s not localisation, which is mainly about customising your product for specific markets by translating it into the local language.

Cultural translation is strategic: understanding how the emotional need your product serves at home transforms when it crosses borders.

For example, a language-learning product could expand by updating the website copy to state “available in the UK” and adding PayPal. Cultural Translation asks: “What does language learning mean to a second-generation Nigerian Brit who’s never lived in Lagos?”

The answer is not  “career advancement” or “travel prep.” It’s reconnection. Understanding the grandmother when she calls. Code-switching between corporate life and family gatherings without feeling like an imposter.

That emotional repositioning drives conversion.

The three pillars

Here are the three pillars of cultural translation:

1. Emotional mapping: Your product serves an emotional need at home. How does that need shift in diaspora contexts? 

A data journalism product might serve “credible information” at home.

For diaspora? The messaging angle is — “Maintaining informed connection while navigating foreign perceptions of Africa.” 

Same need, different emotional context.

For a language learning product like Lingawa, the shift is even more profound.

Your message stops being “Learn [X Language]” and becomes “Reconnect with your roots.”

From lesson streaks to stories about identity, aunties, family reunions, and the joy of hearing your name pronounced the way your grandmother says it. Learning becomes collective identity work, and your pricing becomes premium because you’re not selling vocabulary. You’re selling reconnection.

That’s emotional translation.

Related Article: Techstars-backed Lingawa raises $1.1M, pivots to language learning

2. Identity architecture: Diasporans buy tools for identity construction. Dye Lab has situated itself as a formidable cultural artefact. Their pieces aren’t just “fashion”, they’re tools for performing cultural identity in host-country contexts. Does your product help maintain cultural continuity? Signal belonging? Provide cultural capital?

Note: This cultural specificity varies by market

This cultural specificity varies dramatically by market. Dye Lab co-founder Ozzy Etomi learned this firsthand: in Accra, buyers shied away from red fabrics because red is a Ghanaian funeral colour. “We had all these red boubous and prints that people were avoiding.”

That same specificity appears elsewhere. “Even within American cities, we found New Yorkers are very different from people in Texas with how fashionable they are or the things they’re willing to wear versus in Europe where they lean towards darker colors because they’re more conservative and feel like it’s too bright to wear on the streets of London,” Etomi adds.

This affects inventory decisions and marketing strategy for each community. It’s Cultural Translation in action—understanding that the same product triggers different emotional responses based on cultural context.

3. Trust currency: You can’t export a brand that’s failing at home. Diasporans watch your home market reputation closely. They have dual cultural fluency and can spot inauthenticity from both sides. That means your domestic dirty laundry doesn’t stay local. If you break trust here, you break it there.

We had to navigate this exact minefield at Stears: sunsetting a B2C product while launching UK expansion, asking new markets to trust us while disappointing existing customers.

Our strategy: Transparency (early, honest communication), value preservation (migrated enterprise subscribers to B2B tools), sequential messaging (different audiences, consistent values), and media leverage (every piece of coverage included our expansion narrative).

Our results: 70% positive sentiment during a product shutdown. That trust equity became market capital. Our UK launch locked down tier-one coverage, including African Business and CNBC, because we had demonstrable home market credibility.

You build trust at home and spend it abroad. If your wallet’s empty, no expansion budget saves you. (Taps your shoulder in wake-up-to-reality.)

The playbook

Enough theory. Here’s your implementation playbook:

Phase 1: The audit

Answer these before spending anything:

– What emotional need does our product serve at home?

– How does that need manifest for diasporans?

– What’s our home reputation? Can we export it?

– Which segment are we targeting? (Ethnic affirmers or Biculturals?)

Phase 2: Translation map

Map your positioning (here’s a sample using Dye Lab as a case study):

– Home emotional need: “Look good, stand out”;  Diaspora emotional need: “Wear your culture proudly in foreign spaces.”

– Home value prop: “Unique, handcrafted designs “;  Diaspora value prop: “Wearable cultural artefacts that spark conversation.”

– Home proof points: “Featured in Lagos Fashion Week”; Diaspora proof points: “Worn by diasporans at weddings, boardrooms, and cultural events.”

Test with actual diaspora community members. Iterate on emotional resonance.

Phase 3: Execute

– Channel selection: Where do your targets actually spend time?

– Community validation: Launch small, get feedback, iterate publicly

– Consistency: Every touchpoint reflects cultural understanding

– Right metrics: Track retention and lifetime value, not just conversion

The bottom line

Next-generation diaspora consumers are digitally native, culturally sophisticated, and allergic to inauthenticity. So if the plan is to expand, don’t lead with hunger for market share. Lead with heart.

The brands that will actually win are the ones that treat culture like a strategy, not decoration. It shows up in the product, the customer experience, and the way you show up for the community. That requires cultural translation, not just press coverage.

The diaspora doesn’t need more products. They need products that get them. And understanding people? That’s what communications professionals do best.

This article was written by Toluwanimi Onakoya, Communications Manager at Lingawa