The Quiet Specialist, our MVP
How Dangsenpenan Nokshuwan built a movement for West Africa’s Salesforce ecosystem, one report, one classroom, and one community at a time
Salesforce MVP, Class of 2026 | Written for the Africa Ohana Interest Story Series
A Linguist Before an Administrator
Long before Dangsenpenan Nokshuwan ever opened a Salesforce org, he was opening novels. He studied English language and literature for his first degree, growing up in a small town in Plateau State, in central Nigeria, as part of what he describes as a small minority tribe. He read critical theory for pleasure. He wrote poetry on the side. He still does.
When asked who I am I would like to believe I’m someone who aspires to live a very simple, human-centered life. “The whole essence of living is to be able to impact others. I aspire to be kind. I aspire to be generous. I aspire to leave a lasting impact with whoever I interact with.“
It is an unusual foundation for a career that would eventually put him at the center of a movement across West Africa’s Salesforce ecosystem. But the throughline is not really about technology at all. It is about language, about being able to find the words that help someone else understand something they could not see before. That, more than any certification, is what Dangsenpenan has spent years doing.
The Report That Changed Everything
His first encounter with Salesforce came at the end of 2021, while he was working in Lagos, Nigeria, on the project delivery team at MainOne, the telecommunications company later acquired by Equinix. MainOne was one of Salesforce’s customers in Nigeria, and Dangsenpenan’s work put him close to the platform without ever putting him in charge of it.
“The first thing I did was run a report, and it was just so fascinating,” he recalled. “I could just pull out all of this information by these filters, and I could see everything around the system. It got me really curious. What’s behind all of these things? And curiosity drove me to start learning.”
His manager noticed the curiosity and connected him to a contact in the ecosystem, a former classmate based in Canada. It was the beginning of a learning journey that would ask a great deal of him before it gave anything back.
The Learning Plan
The Canada connection did not last. Time zone differences made the sessions unworkable, and Dangsenpenan had to pivot and be sponsored by Oxfordable Careers. He refers to the training under both names in his own account, but it was through that sponsored program that his real training began.
By the time he was preparing for his Administrator exam, he was based in Jos, and he did not study alone. He and a fellow learner named Godfrey Mallan formed a study partnership with Shedrak Jatau, who was slightly further ahead in his own certification journey. Godfrey Mallan would drive to Dangsenpenan’s house, collect him, and the two would go to Shedrak’s house to prepare together, sharing knowledge over weeks of study.
“We took the exam around September of 2022. I went upstairs, I wrote the exam, and I passed. Godfrey Mallan went up. He passed as well”. “I will never forget that one, in 2022.” The other certifications that came after had their uniqueness, but his first is undoubtedly unforgettable.
Passing the Administrator exam did not end the work. He and Godfrey Mallan began building practice applications immediately afterward, including a pharmacy app built to solve a genuinely local problem, before preparing together for the Platform App Builder certification using the same routine: the same space, the same setup, and the same discipline.
A Village of Mentors
What followed was not a solo climb but a series of communities that took him in. After passing his Administrator exam, he joined a short CRM Analytics course run by YDev, an organization then incubating Salesforce talent in Nigeria, under a tutor named Manny Omideyi. Years later, the two would attend the same events in London, and Dangsenpenan would be the one dragging his former tutor down to Nigeria for West Africa Dreamin’.
He then joined a more extensive program run by Askia Tech under Nell Paye and Sambeet Mishra, working through Nonprofit Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Industries Cloud, and Education Cloud with a cohort of six to seven learners. Two members of that small cohort would go on to become Salesforce MVPs in the Class of 2026: Maxwell Tuglo and Dangsenpenan himself; Maxwell, whom he first worked with as project manager on an implementation under the same incubator. It was through that program that he met Tunde Mosaku, who became a mentor who has stayed with him ever since. Nell Paye now runs incubation programs of her own in Liberia, building a hub that provides education to young people in the region.
He was also part of the first and, at the time, only Black cohort of Salesforce’s Talent Alliance Career program, run in London.
“I’m the kind of person who runs to people when I need help and support. I always run for advice; I always run for guidance,” he said, naming Tunde Mosaku, Nell Paye, Eve Nyarango, Stephanie Herrera, Jack McKurdy, Ursula Fear, and Bamnan Dikwal among those who shaped him. He also credits Donna Nicholls, who led digital transformation during his time at the RSPCA, for teaching him to see the bigger strategic picture and Shariff Shalaan, whose thirty-minute call talked him through a moment when the first West Africa Dreamin’ conference felt “very bleak and unreachable.”
“The ecosystem found me a new family,” he said
Not For Salesforce: The Move to the UK
It is a detail people are often surprised by: Salesforce is not what brought Dangsenpenan to the United Kingdom. Having transitioned from literature into project management, he moved to London to complete a master’s degree in project management, building on work experience he already had in project delivery back in Nigeria. It was only after arriving, and seeing the scale of the global ecosystem for himself, that he leaned fully into the platform he had already invested so much in.
He has since held three to four roles connected to the ecosystem. The first was in consulting, working largely with nonprofit clients. He then joined the RSPCA, an animal welfare charity, supporting its work across Nonprofit Success Pack, Service Cloud, and Field Service. Today, he works at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in London, supporting the charity’s animal welfare initiatives across NPSP and nonprofit cloud. Since 2023, and for more than two years within animal welfare specifically, his career has been rooted almost entirely in the nonprofit sector, a thread that runs directly into the work he would go on to build back home.
You Can Only Dream As Big As You Can See
The idea for West Africa Dreamin’ was not born in West Africa. It was born in a room in London holding more than fifteen thousand people, at a Salesforce World Tour event Dangsenpenan attended after his move. The scale of what he saw there, set against the ecosystem he had known in Nigeria, changed something in how he understood opportunity.
“You can only dream as big as you can see,” he said, a principle he draws directly from literature and critical theory. “A lot of our community members don’t understand the vastness of the ecosystem and the opportunities that lie within it, because they can only see it from the lens of what is local to them. If someone in the room wants to be a technical architect, they cannot physically perceive what that means because there is none close to them. But if you bring the dream closer, they can see it; they can touch it. I can be that person.”
There were no Salesforce World Tour events anywhere in West Africa, and outside of South Africa and Morocco, few anywhere on the continent. Dangsenpenan set out to close that gap from both directions: bringing global attention to the businesses already using Salesforce locally, most of which the wider ecosystem did not believe existed, and bringing the scale of global opportunity within reach of local talent.
West Africa Dreamin’ was the result. The inaugural edition was held on 16 November 2024 at the Landmark Event Centre in Lagos, Nigeria. The second edition moved to Accra, Ghana, on 15 November 2025, hosted at the Movenpick Ambassador Hotel under the theme of Innovation and Local Impact. The conference returns to Lagos for its third edition on 21 November 2026.
Alongside the conference, Dangsenpenan co-founded the Tech Trailblazers Community Foundation, applying the Nonprofit Success Pack expertise he had built through his day job to structure the charity that would house the movement. Every part of it runs on volunteer labour. Nobody is paid, nobody profits, and everything generated is channelled back into the community: training, mentorship, direct and indirect job connections, and, increasingly, support helping nonprofits and charities across the region get digitally set up to benefit from the same tools his community has built expertise in.
Finding Family in Africa: Ohana
Dangsenpenan’s connection to Africa Ohana began quietly, in 2022, at what he calls the height of his struggle in the ecosystem. He saw Jennifer Ndlovu on LinkedIn, visible and self-assured in a way he, a shy and private person by nature, admired and did not know how to replicate himself. He messaged her simply to ask how she did it. The conversation went quiet for two years.
It resumed in 2024, when Dangsenpenan reached out while planning the first West Africa Dreamin’ and pulled Jennifer Ndlovu into the project, insisting she come to Lagos to be welcomed properly into the community. Jennifer, in turn, connected him with ThankGod Okoro, who needed volunteer opportunities. ThankGod’s first real leadership responsibility came through West Africa Dreamin’, an entire unit run without oversight.
“He just took over and went on autopilot. I’m like, yo, okay, I’ve got a great talent there,” he said. ThankGod would go on to become one of Africa Ohana’s founders and a West Africa Dreamin’ organizer in his own right.
After the first West Africa Dreamin’, the idea of Africa Ohana began to take shape, and Dangsenpenan was there from the earliest conversations. Drawing on his Nonprofit Success Pack background, he advised Jennifer and ThankGod on how to structure the organization: platforms, registration, and the mechanics of building something out of thin air. He was present at the launch. From there, he joined the Education team, helping design and deliver the community’s first learning programs and co-running its first Talent Alliance cohorts alongside Maxwell Tuglo and Eve Nyarango.
As Africa Ohana grew, his role moved with it. He now serves as Team Lead, for Partnerships, Support, and Fundraising, guiding where the community builds relationships and how it raises the resources to sustain its work. On the day the Africa Ohana website launched, he was one of the people actively out there asking people to give.
His day-to-day involvement has lessened as his other commitments have grown, a fact he acknowledges plainly. But the bond has not thinned with the time. “Africa Ohana is in my heart,” he said. “They’re just right there.”
MVP class of 2026
Dangsenpenan did not expect to become a Salesforce MVP. He had followed the program for years and admired what it stood for: recognizing people committed to community building, generosity, and knowledge sharing, values he had been living out without ever framing them that way. When the nomination email arrived, unprompted and unanticipated, his instinct was to decline the invitation to submit a form. There was still too much left to build, he felt, and he is, by his own description, a fundamentally shy and quiet person.
It was Tunde Mosaku and a colleague named Sègun De Silva who talked him into filling it out, reminding him that ignoring the people who had taken the time to nominate him was its own kind of disrespect. He submitted the form and did not think much more about it.
“The whole of that week, I was trying to wrap my head around what just happened,” he said of the announcement. “I didn’t see it as a celebration or as a title to wear like a crown. I see it as a responsibility to do more. To whom much is given, much is expected.”
Asked why the community chose him, he does not claim to fully know. “It’s very difficult to see the big picture of things when you are within yourself,” he said. “What others might see of you, you might not see the same of yourself. But if others see good in what you are doing, identify what that thing is, and press on into it.”
The Next Five Years
Dangsenpenan is unambiguous about where he believes the African Salesforce ecosystem is headed. Tech Trailblazers Community Foundation is expanding, hiring new roles, and investing directly in growing the region’s talent base and identifying areas of expertise to incubate for the global ecosystem.
“In the next five years, I see the Salesforce African ecosystem not just being referred to as an emerging market but as the new frontier,” he said. “A place that is reliable, where there is availability of talent, where businesses are using and applying the technology to solve the many gaps that exist locally. Africa has the largest youth population ratio in the whole world, and any smart businessperson that can see how we can tap into that understands there is a lot of gold out there.”
What Remains Untapped
Pressed on what opportunities the continent has yet to seize, Dangsenpenan points first to perception. Too much of the world still sees Africa through a distorted media lens, he argues, while foreign business communities already operating on the ground, French and Chinese firms in Nigeria among them, see something entirely different. He names Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia as genuine technology hubs producing serious products, often overlooked in favour of markets like India.
He points to practical advantages that go underused: most of the continent operates in English or French as a first language, and its time zones sit conveniently close to European and, in places, American business hours. Where there are gaps, he argues, there is opportunity, but only for those willing to meet the moment.
“For African talent, don’t think you are fighting against a global ecosystem for the same opportunities. You need to be exceptional. You need to go the extra mile to put yourself above everyone else,” he said. “Technical knowledge is rising fast in the world of AI; you cannot lean back and not apply yourself. But with the advent of AI, the people side of things is the piece other people are forgetting. If you can master how to manage people and not let AI widen those gaps, that will be a really great advantage.”
Start. Just Start.
Asked what he wants people to remember about his contribution to Salesforce, Dangsenpenan does not point to a conference, a certification count, or a title.
For those who see themselves in him, quiet, hesitant, convinced they lack the experience to build a community, his advice is deliberately simple. Start, because starting is the only way through. Then find someone already doing the work, someone who will be brutally honest with you rather than simply agreeable. He credits a mentor named Ursula for playing exactly that role in his own life, someone he turns to when he needs a difficult decision punched full of holes before he trusts it.
He offers one more piece of advice, drawn from his own temperament. Being quiet is not a disadvantage. It is a vantage point. At the first West Africa Dreamin’, a volunteer spent the entire day beside him without realising he was the organiser, assuming instead that the visible names, the ones who had mentored her directly, were the ones actually running things. When she finally learnt who he was, the conversation that followed was, in his words, one of real insight, the kind that only opens up once the assumed hierarchy falls away. Being low-key, he said, gave him the room to see things other people were too busy being seen to notice.
Never Forget Your Why
Dangsenpenan Nokshuwan came into the Salesforce ecosystem through a curiosity he could not explain and a report he did not need to run. He built his skills an ocean away from the people teaching him and then spent every year since making sure the people coming after him would not have to do it quite so alone. West Africa Dreamin’, the Tech Trailblazers Community Foundation, and his ongoing work at Africa Ohana are not separate achievements running alongside his MVP recognition. They are the reason for it.