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#VPTourOfTech: NITDA Is Paying Close Attention

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By Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, PhD

 

When the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo SAN, gave his steering speech at the 2016 e-Nigeria International Conference and Exhibition, emphasising the point that the President Buhari administration is set to reset Nigeria’s economic architecture by diversifying from oil dependency and leveraging on ICT as a critical contributor to the economy, some people felt it was the usual talk by political leaders, without any intention to bring the vision to fruition.

 

But events have come to prove that real change is happening in the way government is engaging with Tech.

 

In 2017, Mr President himself attended the e-Nigeria International Conference and Exhibition to give his scorecard on support for the Information Technology sector and his plans for its further development.

 

It was therefore not a surprise when I received the mail that I was to join His Excellency the Vice President (VP) for a tour of the Innovation Hubs in Lagos.

 

Although NITDA through its Office for ICT Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIIE) embarked on a similar trip in November 2017, having to accompany the VP is something special.

 

The purpose of the visit was to gain first-hand knowledge of the innovation ecosystem.

 

The Honourable Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Ogbonaya Onu, was also on the VP’s entourage.

 

This was not a regular official function, it was not a time of talking and lecturing the citizens about what government has done or not done; it was a time to LISTEN.

 

Indeed we listened to our young, vibrant, passionate and highly motivated youths. They demonstrated to us that the best of Nigeria is yet to be unveiled.

 

It was a tour that gave hope to all. The young people saw in the government team, a breath of fresh thinking.

 

They did not see the grand-standing and disruptiveness that such a visit would have caused in the past.

 

They remained at their work, coding, some were eating some were taking selfies with the VP. It was such a joy to see the glee on everyone that day.

We listened to the Paystack story, how Shola and Ezra began a quiet revolution in payments processing back in 2014.

 

Paystack has now become one of the most efficient payment processors in the country.

 

Many did not pay attention to Andela until Mark Zuckerberg announced an investment in the Startup.

 

Andela set out to solve the problem of top-class IT skills gap in Africa and the world.

 

Andela recruits interns after a rigorous process in which less than 1% of over 70,000 scale through.

 

The interns then go through a six-month intensive bootcamp that sharpens them to become world-class.

 

The energy, intelligence and zeal of the over 500 strong office of young people in T-shirts and Jeans is enthralling.

 

Sulyman, the VP Global Operations, gave the visitors an expose on the business model, opportunities and challenges of Andela.

 

Flutterwave is sited in a bunker-like structure. This company was founded by a team of ex-bankers, entrepreneurs and engineers.

 

In less than two years of its founding this payment gateway has processed transactions valued over $2 billion and has over 45,000 merchants.

 

Time would fail me to talk about Autogenius, Carido, Asoko Insight, Branch.

 

These are startups that provide solutions ranging from auto-mechanics, micro insurance, micro loans, corporate intelligence etc.

 

Indeed the Nigerian genius is unleashed and we at NITDA are paying close attention.

 

We visited 6 places and listened to 14 Startups tell us what they do.

 

FarmCrowdy solves the problem of under-utilized arable farm lands, help farmers access capital, help people invest in agriculture without owning a farm and everybody gets a share of the profit.

 

That is amazing indeed. At Africa Fintech Foundry (AFF) operated by Access Bank Plc.

we saw an organisation getting itself ready for the new face of banking and finance.

 

The final stop was at Co-Creation Hub, Yaba.

 

This pioneering beehive of innovation is not resting on its oars.

 

Cc-Hub is giving Nigeria its first home-grown cyber-security platform called Safe-Online.

 

In the same place we met Re-Learn, a Startup that is working to transform difficult educational concepts into funny cartoons.

 

We spoke with the Managing Partner of Growth Capital, Tunji Eleso who told us how they are helping fund innovations of Nigerians by Nigerian investors.

Throughout the tour, I as the Director General/CEO of the National Information Technology Development Agency(NITDA)paid very close attention and took notes copiously.

 

I noted the opportunities and challenges of the sector as well as the impact or gap of our interventions as an Agency of Federal Government.

 

Since we came on-board, I had often reiterated my resolve to impact the ‘Forgotten Ones’ in the tech ecosystem.

 

By this I mean the enterprising Startups, the Women, Children and small enterprises.

 

One of the things we did was to reposition OIIE not as a competitor with the Hubs, rather to be a facilitator and policy compass to ensure the sector got all what it needed to grow.

 

In this regard, we prepared a draft of the Nigerian ICT Innovation And Entrepreneurship Framework(NIIEF).

 

The objective of the Framework is to cast a vision for the ICT innovation ecosystem, identify the stakeholders, define critical roles of NITDA in their development and responsibilities of all stakeholders.

 

A stakeholders’ engagement was held in the 4th quarter of 2017, where representatives of the Hubs, Academia, States and Federal Government all made inputs to the Draft.

 

The Draft was further scrutinized at the recently organised I4Policy Hackathon held in Lagos and Abuja.

Inputs of stakeholders have been taken and would continue to be until we have a document fit-for-purpose.

 

 

The IT Projects Clearance function of NITDA has also become a veritable instrument to empower Startups in Nigeria.

 

The Committee has been gathering data to identify IT projects that can be reserved for the small-scale tech companies.

 

Our goal is to engage the relevant Agencies to find a way to reduce the entry barrier for young people to bid and win government contracts in areas they have shown relative competence.

 

Also, we have insisted on local content where such capacities exist. Another initiative we are experimenting at NITDA is to match Startups and Hubs with successful winners of our project bids.

 

This has proven successful in some of our programmes and projects as the young innovators bring agility and fresh-thinking to the process while getting experience and finance.

 

We would ensure this programme continues and grows to become a model for implementing IT and other projects in Nigeria.

 

Indeed, the creative zeal and passion of the Nigerian youth has caught the attention of the world and President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is paying close attention and giving the necessary support without disrupting the disruptors.

 

 

 


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Ugo Onwuaso is an ICT enthusiast. He believes technology should be used for general good. He holds a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree from the Lagos state University. Dear Reader, Your support matters. But we believe that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. That is why, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and finance and how they affect lives. Our incisive and analytical view of how technology news affects the daily life help individuals and organizations make up their minds. Quality journalism costs money. Today, we're asking that you support us to do more. Kindly support our effort to deliver technology and finance journalism to everyone in the world. Donate as little as N1,000. Bank transfers can be made to: UBA Plc 1017156876 Communication Week Media Ltd

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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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