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The Danger of Deep Training for Startups

By
Mutiu Iyanda
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0

Beyond the conventional knowledge and skills acquisition from physical and virtual classrooms, employers also expect employees to improve the knowledge and skills through hand-on trainings and seminars. In most cases, both the employers and employees work together towards bridging knowledge and skill gaps in their establishments.

Over the years, several reports and scholarly results have indicated that training increases efficiency and productivity. Arguments have also been that employees with better training have the tendency of having better performance outputs in all ramifications Also, there would be less wastage of scarce resources when personnel are trained properly. Failure to train employees properly and constantly, according to a number of sources and experts, will lead to poor job performance and increase levels of work-related stress.

These two schools of thought have arguably led to increase in training spending across organisations throughout the world. Among the varied categories of organisations [profit-making and non-profit making], startup businesses have been found to always train their employees. This has largely been premised on the fact that startups need to constantly refine their processes, reskill and upskill people towards sustainable value creation, delivery and capturing. This is important in markets where competition is high and essential that employees improve on their leadership, communication, collaboration and role-specific skills.

A source has it that “training and development is most effective when implemented strategically, which involves content development, method of delivery, and integration of technology.” Our checks reveal that businesses use internal and external training approaches. When the internal approach is adopted, team leads and heads of departments oversee reskilling and upskilling of their junior ones.

In some situations, junior ones also train themselves on hand-on skills. We have also seen Chief Executive Officers leading training sessions. This is not a bad idea as long as it increases institutionalisation of corporate culture and eliminates senior employees’ norms and traditions of creating a toxic environment for the junior ones.

Our analyst notes that it is expected of the Human Resources Department or any department assigned with the responsibility of ensuring the skills development and growth of every employee to identify gaps in knowledge and skill application before suggesting training programmes or courses.

However, too much of training for employees, according to our analyst, without piecemeal application before another training is not healthy for startups. Experience has shown that entry level employees usually have challenges in comprehending training outputs and applying them when trainings are not done systematically using distance schedule method [DSM].

Our analyst suggests that startups need to consider quarterly, bi-annually and yearly training when it is highly imperative for the process reengineering and people’s reskilling and upskilling. The expectation is that companies that follow a quarterly schedule would be able to grow in terms of lead generation, revenue increase and profitability in another quarter when it is obvious that the previous quarter growth in the contexts of these variables was not encouraging. This also applies to using bi-annually and yearly schedules.  According to an expert, “getting into the habit of training [our emphasis] and not applying will make employee go down the slippery slope that leads to procrastination,” which would have severe impacts on value creation and delivery processes.

 

Five HEN Foundation SEED Awardees Receive Full Tekedia Mini-MBA Scholarships

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0

The Hen Foundation founded by Jamil Eniola, and named as a befitting memorial to his late mother, with the objectives of empowering the needy, has awarded full scholarships to five students to attend Tekedia Mini-MBA which begins on June 7 to end Sept 1, 2021. The Foundation has already offered SEED Awards to these student-innovators for their community projects. We also wish Jamil who celebrates his birthday today, a happy birthday in wealth, wisdom and health, as he serves his community and humanity.

The Foundation has noble aims, to encourage and implement positive change in Nigeria through better and more accessible health care, the achievement of universal education and working towards an empowerment among the underprivileged members of society. Tekedia Institute is honoured to be partnering with the Foundation.

The five scholars joining Tekedia Institute are:

  1. Abigael Omeneke Anaka-Mark
  2. Oluwasolamidotun Kassim
  3. Mubarak Akingboye
  4. Benjamin Adegbenro
  5. Wonderful Osalor

We congratulate them for their innovations and are very confident that co-learning with us will improve their capabilities to execute on their missions.

Full Press Release

HEN FOUNDATION: SEED AWARD for best 5 students with innovative and unique problem solving ideas

Lagos, 31 May 2021:

The Hen Foundation founded by Jamil Eniola and named as a befitting memorial to his late mother, with the objectives of empowering the needy. The foundation has noble aims, to encourage and implement positive change in Nigeria through better and more accessible health care, the achievement of universal education and working towards an empowerment among the underprivileged members of society.

Apart from Mr. Jamil Eniola’s philanthropic activities in Africa, he has also been a veritable source of hope and succor to the needy in the U.K and was among the first people to come to the aid of victims of the June 14, 2017, Grenfell fire disaster in London.

Over the years, HEN Foundation has reached out to thousands of Nigerians in the wake of various crises. We have worked with schools to improve quality of education, empowered women to make them more independent economically.

Some of our recent humanitarian responses in Nigeria include:

  1. Developing primary and secondary school students interest in mathematics by introducing a Math Skill Program across schools in different states of Nigeria.
  2. Cancer Screening/awareness exercise for over 2000 women in partnership with the Cancer Research Centre, University of Ibadan and Femi Gbajabiamila Foundation in Surulere, Lagos State and donations of medical equipment to the UI Cancer Screening Centre.
  3. Empowerment program for women into Small and Medium Enterprise across Lagos State, Nigeria.
  4. Organized Leadership Roundtables plenary session in collaboration with Student Union leaders of University of Ibadan and School Management, theme: “Student Leadership in the 21st century-The critical interface between student government and university administration”

SEED AWARD

In a bid to further accomplish one of our most important goals which is to educate and empower underprivileged members of the society, we came up with the SEED award for the brightest and most innovative students in Nigerian universities who against all odds are trying to bring change to the society by initiating projects that can only be imagined by most people.

S – Students’

E – Enhanced

E – Engagement

D – Development

The selected students for the SEED award were subjected to a fair screening exercise alongside other hundreds of students. The screening was done at different levels and some were dropped as the screening progresses at different stages. The Final 5 selected for the HEN Foundation SEED award who are multi talented students with exemplary innovative projects are:

  1. Abigael Omeneke Anaka-Mark
  2. Oluwasolamidotun Kassim
  3. Mubarak Akingboye
  4. Benjamin Adegbenro
  5. Wonderful Osalor

It is our belief that this opportunity will further enhance their creativity and create a better environment for them to succeed and also build their network. HEN Foundation plans to make this SEED award a regular scheme and create more entrepreneurs in our society.

These entrepreneurs will create more start up businesses with their unique and innovative minds, and they will employ more citizens which will help to reduce unemployment in Nigeria and also contribute to the country’s GDP.

Mr. Jamil Eniola,

HEN Foundation President

This Portfolio Startup Is Outperforming Across Core Indicators

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0

We have a star and a really fast rising startup in our portfolio, from May update: “in our January update, we disclosed ~$2Mn in trade financing unlocked for platform users. This month, an additional $20Mn has been made available through partnerships with commercial bankers and digital lenders and would be made available to support loan-seeking traders on the platform. This enables the platform to expand its financing capabilities as we approach opening the international trade e-terminal for import/export transactions in August.” Destination: ring the bell.

Join us at Tekedia Capital, and have access to some of the most amazing startups, operating in continental Africa. And if you do, you will read the full update of this startup I quoted above.

Tekedia Capital offers a specialty investment vehicle (or investment syndicate) which makes it possible for citizens, groups and organizations to co-invest in innovative startups and young companies in Africa and around the world. Capital from these investing entities are pooled together and then invested in a specific company or companies.

We invest in mainly technology-anchored companies and are sector-agnostic which means those companies could be operating in any industry, including finance, real estate, education, health, logistics, etc. The opportunity is open for individuals in Africa, Africans in diasporas, global citizens in any place in the world, investment groups and organizations around the world.

China Announces Three-child Policy As Ageing Threatens Its Economy

By
Samuel Nwite
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0

China has reversed its law that allowed for only two children, allowing women to bear up to three children for the first time since 1980. The three-child policy is aimed to cushion the effects of the country’s ageing population that is threatening its workforce and economy.

The decision was announced after a Communist Party Politburo meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping, a meeting in which other proposals such as postponing the retirement age and improving child care services and maternity leave were also discussed, SCMP reported.

“Birth policies will be further improved. A policy that allows a couple to have three children will be introduced with supporting measures. This will improve the population structure of China,” a statement from the Communist Party said after the meeting.

In 2015, the Chinese government completely annulled its one-child policy, allowing women to have two children. The policy started in 2013 with the government allowing only people who were products of the one-child policy to have two children.

Births in China have fallen for four consecutive years, including in 2020, when the number of babies born dropped to the lowest since the Mao era. The country’s total fertility rate — an estimate of the number of children born over a woman’s lifetime — now stands at 1.3, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, raising the possibility of a shrinking population over time.

The one child-policy was enacted in 1980 in an attempt to control China’s exploding population. But the decision apparently did not take the long term economic impact into consideration. With China’s Communist government, opening the country’s labor market for immigrants like other countries caught in the ageing population crisis is not on the table. At the same time, the government has to maintain a vibrant workforce to keep its economy in its global leading position.

Critics of the one-child policy have centered their concern on the Communist Party’s push to control people’s reproductive choices, a policy seen as part of Chinese government’s long-held tradition of human rights violation.

With China’s industrial strategy, which has helped it change its economic story shrinking, the Communist Party under Xi Jin Ping is being forced to reckon with a labor pool under threat. Xi has resisted the call to remove any restriction on child bearing, and now, moving the number to three children seems to be a sign of acceptance that the policy has jeopardized the economic future of China.

However, critics believe the three-child policy is not enough, that China needs liberal child-bearing policy.

“Opening it up to three children is far from enough,” said Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert with the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based research center. “It should be fully liberalized, and giving birth should be strongly encouraged.”

“This should be regarded as a crisis for the survival of the Chinese nation, even beyond the pandemic and other environmental issues,” Mr. Huang added. “There should never have been a birth restriction policy in the first place. So it’s not a question of whether this is too late.”

While the announcement offers a little hope of a vibrant median age future for China, many concerns are rising. The rising cost of living that has made it more expensive to raise children now and the growing number of families who have come in terms with the one or two child policies, are posing a challenge to the implementation of the three-child policy. Some don’t want to have children at all.

Though the government pledged to encourage acceptance of the new policy with improved more child-friendly benefits like maternity leave, and to “protect the legitimate rights and interests of women in employment,” who usually get stigmatized for having more children, many still doubt that it will change the situation.

The party also said it would increase funding to expand services for the country’s retirees. In 2020, the number of people age 60 and above in China stood at 264 million, accounting for about 18.7 percent of the population. That figure is set to grow to more than 300 million people, or about one-fifth of the population, by 2025, according to the government.

While the new measures targeted at promoting the policy will go a long way, it has created a huge vacuum of age disparity in the labor pool that needs to be filled.

“This policy would have little impact on the trend of the declining labor force in the next 20 years. Hence we expect the government will initiate a policy to delay retirement to address this issue,” Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management said.

The NBS said Chinese mothers gave birth to 12 million babies last year, down from 14.65 million in 2019, marking an 18 per cent decline year on year. There is concern that recent data may be more troubling, prompting the government to make the new rule.

“The decision makers have probably realized that the population situation is relatively severe,” said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in the southern Chinese city of Zhanjiang. “But merely opening up the policy to three children and not encouraging births as a whole, I don’t think there will be a significant increase in the fertility rate. Many people don’t want to have a second child, let alone a third child.”

The one-child policy was in force for over three decades in China, with measures of penalties for women who had more than one child. To compound its present predicament, there was a cultural preference for boys, forcing women sometimes to abort the girl-child. Hence, the policy led to men outnumbering women by 34.9 million in 2020.

The decline in birth rate is as a result of China having more men than women. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the number of women of childbearing-age peaked in 2011 and has been falling since.

As a result, China has been ageing much faster than other low- and middle-income countries with implications that may mar its economic future.

Is Bitcoin Finally Dead Now?

By
Gabriel Eze
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0
Bitcoin is soaring

Bitcoin is dead!

Well, I didn’t say so, but if bitcoin obituaries are anything to go by, bitcoin has died 416 times since its first launch. And there have been several prophecies about the death of bitcoin in the last decade. In January 2015, Matt O’Brien wrote that “if Bitcoin were a currency, it’d be the worst-performing one in the world, worse even than the Russian ruble.” He also noted that “Bitcoin isn’t a currency. [But] … a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another …” Conversation.com reported that “even if the price of Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero, the chances [of] the Bitcoin community convincing the wider public, governments, and industry that Bitcoin really represents the future of the world’s digital economy will become extremely unlikely.” [1]

In 2017, Peter Schiff, the Economist, best known for predicting the 2008 Financial Crash, was quoted  to have said that bitcoin and other “[crypto]currencies are going to trade to zero or pretty close to it when the bubble pops,” and that “the only reason why people are buying bitcoin is because the price is going up. When it turns around, they are not going to sell it for the same reason.”

How deep is the dip?

The crypto market recently experienced a plunge in prices of major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin dipping to as much as 50% in value. On Wednesday 12 May 2021, bitcoin price crashed from $58 thousand to as low as $36 thousand by Wednesday 19 May 2021, although it seems to be rebouncing towards $40 thousand presently. In all of these, bitcoin has proven to be the proverbial cat with nine lives.

By the way, it is important to note that although bitcoin price has fallen, the price  is relatively high when compared to the fall in price of previous years. Also, at the current price, bitcoin still remains a big gain for investors or adopters who bought earlier, even as recent as January 2021, before Tesla’s (brief) romance with bitcoin in the Valentine’s Day month of the year

Reasons for the crash in bitcoin price

A major hit was China reinforcing its ban of financial institutions, including banks and online payment channels from providing services related to cryptocurrency transactions. China also introduced e-yuan, its proposed central bank digital currency and effectively a replacement for cryptocurrencies in the country. If you look at it closely, the effect of China’s ban on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may not be unconnected with the fact that more than half of bitcoin mining farms are located inside China villages.

CNBC even reports that “China’s Inner Mongolia region has proposed punishments for companies and individuals involved in digital currency mining as it looks to further crack down on the practice.”[2] This is coming after it announced its ban on all cryptocurrency activity having become necessary to “crack down on Bitcoin mining and trading behavior” [and] to prevent the “transmission of individual risks to the social field.”[3]

The second reason for the fall in price of bitcoin is connected to Elon Musk—who apparently has become bitcoin’s single biggest influencer—after tweeting that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin payment for its electric vehicles. According to the Wall Street Journal, “bitcoin’s value against the dollar fell more than 5% after Mr. Musk’s tweet.”

Bitcoin’s Bigger Issues

Though considered to be one of the largest bull market drawbacks in the crypto industry since 2013, the tipping point for bitcoin is the mass adoption of it by institutional investors with Elon Musk making the dailies, daily. Experts in some quarters believe that institutional investors would be best at holding bitcoin. A number of these institutional investors have concerns though—concerns which are arguably historically valid. They range from environmental concerns to illicit activity and cybersecurity risks to speculative investment concerns. Let’s take a look, briefly, at these major concerns.

  1. Environmental Footprint

Bitcoin consumes energy to secure its network through a process called mining. The mining process requires lots of energy. And so do other assets in the world anyways. As mining activity increases, institutional investors, particularly those who must be seen to be supporting government’s clean-energy policies, are increasingly concerned about the corresponding carbon footprint, on one hand, and investing in cryptocurrency while sustaining a green environment, on the other hand. However suspicious Elon Musk’s moves may be—such as possible crypto market manipulation—he appears to be the face of this new movement.

Bitcoin drives a green environment.

Bitcoin faithfuls are not silent on this. They are pushing a different narrative. They hold that mining activity also increases as the value of  gold rises which itself has a negative environmental impact. So many  are asking why cryptocurrency is treated as the black sheep in the fold when other assets, such as gold, use  twice the energy consumption of bitcoin. “To slander crypto-mining as an inherently dirty business appears intellectually dishonest.”[4]

  1. Bitcoin being used for illicit activity

The story about bitcoin being used to facilitate criminal activity is not new. Nigeria’s Central Bank re-emphasized this fact in its directive earlier this year noting that “cryptocurrencies  have  become  wellsuited  for  conducting  many illegal  activities  including  money  laundering,  terrorism  financing,  purchase  of  small  arms  and light  weapons, and tax evasion.” In his work on the  risks  and  threats  of  the  use  of  cryptocurrencies in  Nigeria  for illegal activities, Senator  Ihenyen, says that “one thing is clear: Nigeria’s increasing cryptocurrency adoption is presently not only one of the highest in the world but also one of the safest.” And that “[t]he biggest use cases for cryptocurrency in the country remain speculative investment and peer-to-peer remittances or cross-border transactions.” It is reported that there is less illicit activity on the Bitcoin system than the traditional banking system..

  1. Cybersecurity risks

The Bitcoin technology which technically runs on the blockchain is arguably considered the technology nearly impossible to hack.  To break through or hack the blockchain technology, a 51% quorum must be reached—what is known as the 51% attack. The Bitcoin blockchain for example has an incentive system where miners are rewarded for mining. It is important that core developers consider “adopting a governance framework that safeguards the collective interests of the protocol. Whether through proof of work (eg, as adopted by Bitcoin and Ethereum) or proof of stake (eg, as adopted by EOS), a strong incentive system helps to minimise the risk of 51% attacks on the blockchain.”[5]

  1. Bitcoin as a speculative investment

It is true that today a number of cryptocurrencies including bitcoins are mainly used as speculative investments and not as alternative currencies or medium of exchange. But adopters are not necessarily a “conglomeration of desperate, disparate, and unregulated actors” as they were described by the CBN in its recent response following its cryptocurrency directive. Several regulatory authorities around the world have classified bitcoin and similar  virtual assets as commodities, making  them  tradable. In fact, Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) took the same position in its September 2020 statement on digital assets in Nigeria. As one of the key stakeholders mentioned in the proposed National Blockchain Adoption Strategy by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), CBN can help to significantly improve the intergovernmental coordination that appears to be currently missing in digital-assets regulation in the country. I have written more on this here.

Conclusion

Bitcoin seems to be currently battling for dear life. This battle becomes bigger with the renewed debate on the environmental impact of bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies on climate change. Also, increasingly, more central banks or reserve banks  are considering introducing their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). China continues to resist crypto adoption in its financial system. And lastly, crypto volatility which is a major concern to both regulators and investors remains one of crypto’s biggest battles. Whether bitcoin will shake these off like it has in other times and return to its all-time high (ATH) or even exceed the numbers remains to be seen. So will this episode be the final death of bitcoin or will it be yet again another obituary with an empty grave? Time will tell.

 

[1] Note that bitcoin operates both as a currency and a technology—the blockchain technology. When referred to as a technology, it is spelt with the first letter ‘B’ in capital. But when it is used as a currency, it is spelt with a small letter ‘b’. Its usage in the quoted texts and other places are deliberate in order to maintain editorial integrity and comply with rules of grammar where applicable.

[2] Arjun Kharpal, ‘Major Bitcoin Mining Region in China Sets Tough Penalties for Cryptocurrency Activities’, CNBC,  May 2021

[3] ibid

[4] Lawrence Wintermeyer ‘Bitcoin Energy’s Consumption is a Highly Charged Debate’, Forbes.com, March 2021

[5] Senator Ihenyen, ‘The Comparative Guide to Blockchain 2020 (Nigeria)’, Mondaq.com, May 2020

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