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Digital Platforms Provide Opportunity to Target Export Markets-Ehimuan –

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Juliet Ehimuan Chiazor is the country manager, Google Nigeria, the global Internet-software giant; with specialisation in internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies.
Ehimuan has registered her name as a Nigerian woman of substance having led somewhat revolution to see more Nigerians and businesses get online. Her experience spans international markets primarily in technology, new media, and Oil & Gas industries.
In 2011 she was listed in Forbes magazine as one of the top 20 youngest power women in Africa. The Nigeria Computer Society also awarded her “IT Personality of the Year” in 2012.
In this interview with peter ugwu, Ehimuan radiates her passion for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and talks about the recent Google’s Share Your Nigeria Content (SYNC) conference.

About SYNC
SYNC stands for Share Your Nigerian Content. SYNC Nigeria 2013 was a 3-day outreach event aimed at helping key individuals, businesses and communities in Nigeria better understand and leverage the power of the internet for social and economic growth.
It included workshops, trainings, demos and 1-on-1 sessions aimed at helping to share more knowledge required for effectively using internet tools to innovate and grow.
The initiative also anchors on the findings of the newly released Dalberg Impact of the Internet study which further reinforces Google’s position on the internet’s power to drive social and economic change.  
In addition to the goal of knowledge sharing and forging closer ties with these key communities, this initiative is also aimed at inspiring a new influx of high quality Nigerian content to the internet space.
There is a lot of great content in Nigeria, attractive to a local and global audience; and digital platforms provide an opportunity to target export markets.

You Mentioned the Dalberg Study? What is that?
Google commissioned Dalberg to perform an ‘Impact of Internet’ study which examines the Internet’s impact on, and potential contribution to, social and economic development in Nigeria.
The study was officially launched on June 3rd, 2013 at the Transcorp hilton in Abuja with the Minister of Communication Technology, Ms Omobola Johnson giving a keynote address.
The report highlights the potential of the Internet for social and economic development. It also seeks to help policy makers understand how their constituencies already use the Internet, where the opportunities lie, what future potential for social impact the Internet offers.
It specifies the need for government to continue to play the lead role as visionaries and first adopters of new technologies.
The report revealed that of all the countries covered in the study (Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and Ghana), Nigeria shows the greatest potential in using the Internet to promote good governance, eCommerce and finance, though these sectors have not yet produced solutions that have spread across the region.
It re-emphasizes that continuing investment in core infrastructure and the rapid implementation of the broadband plan will positively impact on economic growth and employment.

What Other Activities were Part of SYNC Nigeria?
The first day was about sharing local creative content. We had 12 hours of Google+ hangouts, where different Nigerian artists performed to a global online audience via Google+ hangouts.
We also had one-on-one intimate hangouts with different personalities connecting with people around the world. Themes ranged form cake making, to entertainment.
The second day was focused on business. It comprised of highly interactive sessions with advertisers, publishers, media agencies and key influencers.
Themes included new business models,successfully monetizing online, and effectively leveraging online reach channels.
There’s a great opportunity for bid brands to expand their marketing reach by adding a digital component to their advertising campaigns.
This is very important, because more users are getting online to look for information, and business need to be able to meet these users.
Day three focused on Nigerian content creators, social media advocates and other media experts in a bid to help them better understand how to take advantage of the internet to boost content distribution.
The internet presents huge opportunities for Nigeria’s creative and content production industry. We intend to work with this community as well as others to fully harness internet tools and platforms like Youtube that have proven to be very successful across the world.

Result of Google’s Empowerment of SMBs in Nigeria Get Online since 2011
In order to ensure that more locally relevant content gets online, in September 2011, we launched, “Get Nigerian Businesses Online”.
We provided free tools to support Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in creating websites that can load on mobile phones.
The businesses were also provided with up to 10 free email address and listing on Google Maps. We also ran a number of workshops to train people on getting online and also succeeding online.
Through our SMB initiatives, we have been able to get over 40, 000 SMBs online, and we have seen some great success stories across multiple industries.
I am constantly inspired by the successes I hear about. Very recently, I met another SMB who’s business has grown tremendously by getting online.
She runs an online bridal shop, a business she started online after attending one of our SMB training programs.
Prior to that she had been relying on word of mouth referrals with very limited results. Now her sales have increased a hundred fold.

After Getting the Contents Online, How About Accessibility?
 Our strategy in Nigeria is on three things. One is access, which is exactly what you have mentioned. We are earnestly looking at ways (in collaboration with stakholders in the private sector and government) to make the internet more available and affordable to Nigerians.
We have seen more submarine cables land on the West Coast like MainOne and GloOne, and international bandwidth prices have dropped as a result, but there are still last mile challenges.
We have a number of initiatives under the Access bucket. We have a Point-of Presence at the local exchange and our services are cached locally.
We also have an access program with Universities where we provide last mile grants and pay for international bandwidth for 3 years to support the Universities in getting online.
The program also includes free deployment of Google Apps software for education and training of staff and students
Just recently, Mr. President approved the strategy for broadband for Nigeria, which was put together by a Committee and anchored by the Minister of Communication Technology.
We were part of that committee and have served in others created by the Ministry. It is also clear that accelerating broadband growth in Nigeria is top priority for Ministry of Communications Technology, which is great.

Trust as an Issue in Online Transaction
Yes, the issue of e-payment and trust or fear among some people is quite natural. A lot of people are still cautious about making payments online.
However, we are seeing an increasing trend in the adoption of eCommerce and some strong eCommerce players emerging in the marketplace.
We are also seeing models that “pay on delivery” as an attempt to overcome the trust barrier. As more people successfully transact online, confidence in ePayments will increase.
It is important that providers ensure basic security provisions in the design of their services. A positive customer experience is key to drive growth.
It is quite clear that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is trying to drive e-payment across Nigeria (with the cashless policy and other initiatives); so we expect to continue to see a positive trend.

YouTube, Like Google Would Observe Is A Platform For Developers To Upload Their Contents and Make Some Money, How Have Nigerians Benefited From This?
I think what is important to mention at this point is there are great opportunities and we are seeing Nigerians take advantage of those opportunities.
YouTube is an online video content sharing platform; we have a lot of great content coming from Nigeria like Nollywood movies, music concerts, educational, political and news contents. In essence, individuals and organisations are leveraging the platform to share that content and reach a wider audience.
For example, there are some content producers who are extending their businesses online through YouTube, uploading movies online and monetizing the traffic.
There is global demand for Nollywood content, and Youtube provides a great way to tap into the export market.

Partnership between Google and the Financial Sector in Nigeria
We work with organisations across multiple sectors. Our focus is on digital technology which is applicable to every sector – insurance, media, banking, FMCG, and others.
During my presentation at SYNC I shared the example of GTBank as a business taking advantage of the internet to expand its customer service.
When GTBank launched its mobile money service, they created a GT Community on Google+ which was a destination where uses could go, chat with experts, ask questions, and share comments about mobile money and other GTBank products.
They also ran a Google+ hangout as a way to connect to customers. Customers could dial into the hangout, ask questions and interact with the bank service staff.
The bank also used online ads to drive traffic to its various digital assets including NdaniTV channel on Youtube.
Another example is Ultima Studios. Last year, in parallel to the offline “Project Fame” talent competition, Ultima created a wild card competition on Youtube.
This increased user interaction and engagement as users could post comments online and interact with fans.
So, that is an example of a company extending its customer service offering by leveraging technology. We’ve seen other Nigerian companies successfully create digital assets in a similar way.
The internet revolution is definitely real in Nigeria and we are excited by the momentum that is building. This is just the beginning. As broadband access increases, we expect to see great innovations in the Nigerian digital space.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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