Thank you the Nigerian Society of Engineers. I am proud to serve the world as an engineer. It remains like yesterday when my mathematics teacher, Mr Bukar, in JSS3, asked “what would you like to be?” I said: “an electrical engineer; I like the electricity part of Integrated Science”. We build nations.
Tekedia Institute offers an innovation management 12-week program, optimized for business execution and growth, with digital operational overlay. It runs 100% online. The theme is Innovation, Growth & Digital Execution – Techniques for Building Category-King Companies. All contents are self-paced, recorded and archived which means participants do not have to be at any scheduled time to consume contents.
It is a sector- and firm-agnostic management program comprising videos, flash cases, challenge assignments, labs, written materials, webinars, etc by a global faculty coordinated by Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe. Your class will be in our new portal at school.tekedia.com
| Code | Program |
| MINI | Tekedia Mini-MBA costs US$140 (N50,000 naira) per person. |
| MINR | Add extra (optional) $30 or N10,000 if you want us to review and provide feedback on your labs. |
| MINF | Annual Package (includes 3 editions of MINI and optional 2 certificate courses): $280 or N100,000. |
Payment options for any part of the world and Africa available here.
Access Bank Plc Nigeria is rumored to be in talks to acquire some assets of Atlas Mara which is exiting some markets in Africa. According to Bloomberg, Access plans to buy Atlas Mara properties in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. It would be interesting to see how that plays out. Why? Former Barclays boss who ran Atlas Mara evidently overpaid in some of these African businesses. So now he wants to sell, would Access get its usual bargain hunting deals, in which it typically pays largely nothing, for extremely vital properties like defunct Diamond Bank?
And the big one: Access Bank wants to be in 22 African countries by 2025. It has a really long way to go. It is already the largest bank in Africa by customer base. But its market cap remains less than N300 billion even when GTBank Plc is hitting close to N1 trillion and Zenith Bank N740 billion.
Sure, there could be a strategy: have operations in most African countries for the emerging AfCTFA era, and using that, position the bank as the African bank. That is largely UBA’s playbook. Yet, UBA is worth just N280 billion which does imply that the spread has not unlocked leverageable factors for the bank.
Mr. Herbert Wigwe, Access boss, is a brilliant businessman; I wish him and the bank good luck. But he needs to calibrate if there are leverages on running banking operations in Zambia and Zimbabwe, going against battled-tested local players.
When I invested in Florida-based Krozu, I saw the future of project management and productivity measurement. Yes, engineered workflow just the way people work. This is one of the features of Krozu. Watch the video.
Build Project Trees and deliver modular customization regardless of the project or structure complexity. Krozu uses recursive technology to granularize projects making it extremely easy to expand tasks and organize dependencies while improving project outcomes and delivery.
Go and open a free account and use Krozu.
Krozu™ REVOLUTIONIZES project management by organizing projects in the same manner and structure as your business. It makes perfect sense, if businesses have been employing a hierarchical organizational structure for thousands of years, so should your project management tool. This in turn simplifies everything from permissions, roles, progress, dependencies, communication, and much more.
Editor’s Note: For a number of years, Nigeria has been planning to catch up with other countries in the areas of digital and data economy. From the federal to the state governments, policies have been made and still being formulated towards the right ecosystem for the economy. In this piece, Dr Olusola Sayeed Ayoola, the founder of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Nigeria, speaks with our analyst. Looking at some of the early outcomes of policies and programmes of the governments, he believes that Nigeria has what it takes to compete with other countries in the world.
Excerpts
Tekedia: A lot has been said about digital and data economy in the developed world. The discussion has recently entered developing countries, especially the emerging economies such as Nigeria. What does it take be a digital and data economy?
Dr Ayoola: As you know, a digital economy refers to an economy where most of the economic activities use digitized information and knowledge as key factors of production. To be a digital and data economy, three keys things have to be in place; first, you need to have a digital core. This includes supply and support of physical technologies such as semiconductors, processors, data infrastructure, or simply every technology that enables and gives access to the internet and makes human life easy. Secondly, you need the digital product and service providers. These are our online vendors, fintech and mobile payments, e-commerce, social media among others. Lastly, there are digital applications. Businesses and individuals use products and services of digital providers to carry out their business activities. These, in turn, produce data, a vast meaningful amount of data, which then leads to improvement of services and better business inferences. Nigeria has all these 3 layers in place, we saw a 50% increase of mobile internet users from 2015 to 2020 (42.84 to 99.05 million users).
Tekedia: Looking at the Nigerian government policies and programmes in the area of information and communication technologies in the last 10 years, how would you describe the country in terms of digital and data economy?
Dr Ayoola: The Nigerian Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy last developed the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy in line with directives from President Buhari. This at least shows a national commitment to building a strong digital economy. Nigeria is a developing country. In terms of digital and data economy, I’d say we’re growing steadily, although we could leapfrog like China. I believe we will. Last month or so, we saw a Nigerian tech start-up sold for $200M, and in the coming years, more tech start-ups would sell. According to a McKinsey report, fintech investment grew by 197% in the last 3 years. Github just released a statistics, that showed Nigeria as a top code contributor, ahead of China. Nigeria has a brilliant, resilient, innovative, entrepreneurial, and young population. We are steadily catching up to the rest of the world.
Tekedia: Several reports and researches have noted that digital and data economy cannot be attained and sustained without knowledge economy. Considering various issues in our socioeconomic and political leadership would you say the country is really ready for digital and data economy?
Dr Ayoola: Well, I think the digital economy has started already in Nigeria. Yes, we still have gaps in our knowledge economy, but that is changing gradually. In the last five years, Nigeria has seen a big rise in educational/knowledge-based programs. Companies like Andela, RAINigeria, etc are bridging that gap. Fintech are now taking inclusion seriously and doing almost everything possible to understand and help the unbanked. So yes, we are ready and already in a digital and data economy.
Tekedia: For years, Lagos has been known for centre of information and communication technologies when one looks at the place of Computer Village. However, in our research, we discovered that the foundation of computing was laid in Ibadan in 1963 not in Lagos. What made Ibadan city losses its place? What do you think stakeholders need to do to return the city’s past place of being the first in terms of initiatives and programmes?
Dr Ayoola: Stakeholders should organise programs/events that educate and empower its young population (primary, secondary and tertiary institutions) to be a match in the global world. For instance, the Lagos state government organizes programs such as CodeLagos, Art of Tech Lagos among others. They should also look to partner with organizations that offers these educational services like Coursera, RAINigeria, Google, Microsoft etc. They should also support organizations that already provide these kind of educational service within the state.
Tekedia: What advice do you have for parents and students on the need to embrace digital and data economy?
Dr Ayoola: The best time to be a part of the digital economy was yesterday, the next best time is now. Train at RAIN, develop your capacity today. The universities can only do much, you have to give yourself the best available opportunity. This is what RAIN presents.