Telecom
SeerBit Leads the Charge @DevFest Lagos 2024 with Cutting-Edge Solutions

SeerBit, Africa’s most trusted payment solutions provider, has reaffirmed its pivotal role in shaping the future of the technology industry by impacting one billion lives at DevFest Lagos 2024 hosted on 15th and 16th November 2024 at Landmark Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos.
An annual conference organised by the Google Developer Groups Lagos (GDG Lagos), the highly interactive two-day event brought together developers, tech leaders, enthusiasts and innovators from all over Africa and beyond.
Through various workshops, focal sessions, and product showcases, attendees explored the latest advancements and conversations shaping the tech landscape.
As Gold Sponsor of the event, SeerBit reaffirmed its dedication to advancing Africa’s developer ecosystem through the brand’s strategic thought leadership, innovative solutions and Pan African capacity-building initiatives.
On respective days of the event, Olaolu Akintoye, Engineering Manager and Babajide Shoyebo, Senior Product Manager, both from SeerBit, took centre stage as they shared relevant knowledge on key topics shaping the evolving role of technology in driving business and economic growth.
Akintoye, who spoke on the topic – Building Resilient Systems: Flexibility and Adaptability – took attendees through a revealing session into resilience and chaos engineering, as well as the importance of building systems that can adapt and remain stable in the face of disruptive events and actions.
On his part, Shoyebo contributed invaluable nuggets as a panellist in a session that focused on the essence of balancing innovation, agility and compliance in building sustainable businesses. Drawing relevant instances from SeerBit’s operational standards, Shoyebo demonstrated the need to ensure a healthy mix to future-proof businesses.
Equally important, both resource persons shared insights into how SeerBit is utilising cutting-edge technology to simplify payments, while seamlessly addressing payment fragmentation and availability gaps for businesses and their customers across Africa.
“For SeerBit, sponsorship is more than financial support. It’s about accelerating progress in the tech space,’’ disclosed Omoniyi Kolade, Founder and CEO of SeerBit. ‘‘Technology has demonstrated its incredible power to transform lives and developers are the visionaries driving that transformation.
DevFest Lagos 2024 provided the perfect platform for us to engage, inspire and empower developers with the tools and support they need to drive this change. Our goal of impacting one billion lives reflects our long-term commitment to contributing significantly to growth and development within and beyond the tech industry,” he added.
One of the highlights of SeerBit’s participation was the exposure of a memorable brand video which reflected the brand’s visionary ideal in helping businesses of all sizes scale at the speed of commerce and technology.
Also catching the attention was the company’s booth which remained a major attraction point for thousands of attendees, sparking meaningful discussions about integrating SeerBit’s tools into their projects and fostering further growth and impact through the SeerBit community. Crucially, the SeerBit community – SeerBit Developer Community – presents a unique opportunity for attendees to benefit from networking, career growth and hiring opportunities.
The excitement among developers was palpable, with many expressing keen interest in leveraging SeerBit’s products. Afolake Ojo Makinde, a software engineer based in Abuja, attended DevFest Lagos for the first time.
She shared her enthusiasm. “The SeerBit team was incredibly approachable and insightful. Their payment tools are intuitive and I can’t wait to integrate their APIs into my app. It’s inspiring to see a company so invested in helping developers succeed.”
Also lauding SeerBit’s role in the success of the event, was Femi Taiwo, Co-Organiser of DevFest Lagos 2024.
“DevFest Lagos 2024 was an extraordinary celebration of innovation, collaboration and community. With over 3,400 attendees across two action-packed days, we brought developers together to learn, share and grow through technical talks and workshops, led by solid people from within and outside the continent.
“This also created networking opportunities for the community. We’re grateful for the invaluable support of our partners like SeerBit who played a key role in making this event a success and empowering the tech ecosystem in this region and beyond.”
SeerBit’s partnership with the GDG Lagos, organisers of DevFest Lagos 2024, spans several years, aligning with the brand’s mission to positively impact one billion lives through accessible, inclusive and economically empowering digital payment solutions.
The partnership has seen SeerBit supporting various developer-led events hosted by GDG across the country such as Ilorin, Lagos, and Jos, as the brand continues to lead in empowering developers with the tools and resources that they need to create innovative solutions to equip businesses for economic growth.
As part of this project, SeerBit announced further plans to launch several developer-focused initiatives in 2025, including hackathons to challenge and inspire the creation of groundbreaking solutions, capacity-building programmes to train developers, product managers and other tech enthusiasts, as well as seed funding opportunities for standout developer-led projects.
SeerBit is a Pan-African payment solutions provider that makes it easier for businesses and financial service providers to make and accept payments from their customers across Africa. Users have the advantage of enjoying flexible features to fit any business with a single integration.
SeerBit is building a unified payment ecosystem that removes the complexity and fragmentation of the digital payment process in Africa, enabling businesses to seamlessly accept multiple payment methods and streamline online and offline transactions.
Telecom
African Women Hit Hardest as Mobile Internet Gender Gap Persists

African women remain among the most digitally excluded globally, with smartphone affordability and digital literacy among the key barriers. New data from the 2025 GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report, launched recently, reveals a persistent global gender gap in mobile internet use across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
It further notes that literacy, digital skills, safety, and affordability of data also remain critical barriers. The report highlights that 885 million women across these regions still do not use mobile internet, with nearly 60% of them living in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
While mobile internet is the primary way women in LMICs access the internet, offering critical lifelines to health, education, and financial services, the pace of female adoption has stalled, leaving 235 million fewer women than men connected.
Claire Sibthorpe, head of digital inclusion at GSMA, highlighted that the gender gap had narrowed significantly between 2017 and 2020, but progress flatlined in recent years.
Although 2023 brought a slight improvement, restoring the gap to 15%, 2024 saw minimal change, with the gap settling at 14%.
The disparity is most severe in Sub-Saharan Africa, where women are 29% less likely than men to use mobile internet.
“It’s disheartening that progress in reducing the mobile internet gender gap has stalled. The digital divide is driven by deep-rooted socio-economic and cultural factors that disproportionately impact women,” said Sibthorpe.
GSMA projects that closing the gender gap by 2030 could add $1.3 trillion to GDP across LMICs and deliver $230 billion in revenue to the mobile industry.
The report, funded by the UK FCDO, Sida, and the Gates Foundation, stresses the urgent need for targeted investment and policy action to bridge the digital divide and ensure that no woman is left offline.
“The mobile internet gender gap is not going to close on its own. It is driven by deep-rooted social, economic, and cultural factors that disproportionately impact women,” said Sibthorpe.
Telecom
₦800 Billion Infrastructure Plan Set to Boost MTN’s Network Quality Nationwide

In a recent interview, MTN Nigeria reaffirmed that its ongoing infrastructure investment is a strategic step to improve network quality, speed, and nationwide coverage.
Speaking on Beyond the Headlines with Nifemi Oguntoye, Ugonwa Nwoye, Chief Customer and Experience Officer at MTN Nigeria, explained that although public concern is valid, the company undertook several internal cost-efficiency measures before making structural adjustments.
She emphasised that improved investment is critical to fast-tracking improvements across MTN’s network.
Nwoye explained that MTN undertook extensive internal reforms before embarking on structural changes needed to support this scale of investment.
The company completed its phased roll-out of the increase between February and March, ensuring that every existing data plan was below the 50% increase, and most remained below 25%.
She also noted that customers were proactively informed about all changes, particularly when certain legacy plans were retired and replaced with new ones. “We gave customers six to eight weeks’ notice,” she explained.
“This is why it has taken us some time to complete this process, where we let customers know that at a certain date, this particular tariff is not going to exist.”
Nwoye stressed that MTN had exhausted other internal measures before turning to broader structural updates. Now, with the new pricing structure in place, the company is accelerating its investment in infrastructure, spending over ₦200 billion in the first quarter of 2025 alone, a 159% increase from the same period last year. A total capital expenditure of ₦800 billion is planned for the year.
She noted that this investment is a direct outcome of long-term operational restructuring aimed at improving service quality.
She added, “We are investing over ₦800 billion this year alone in our infrastructure. This will translate into better customer experience, reduced congestion, faster internet speeds, and wider network reach.”
This investment will support the upgrade of over 1,000 cell sites and the expansion of more than 2,000 transmission links nationwide.
Nwoye stressed that these upgrades are designed to deliver faster data speeds, fewer dropped calls, and broader network reach, especially in underserved areas.
She acknowledged the public’s expectations for immediate service improvements but emphasised that large-scale infrastructure takes time to deploy.
Nonetheless, MTN expects customers to begin experiencing visible improvements in network performance by the second half of the year.
In a sector where service quality and customer satisfaction are closely watched, MTN maintains that its ongoing investments are not merely capital commitments but vital enablers of improved digital experiences across Nigeria.
Telecom
Remita’s Bold Leap: Nigeria’s Fintech Giant Expands Across Africa

Remita, the pioneering Nigerian payment technology platform developed by SystemSpecs, is charting a bold new course with its planned expansion into markets across Africa.
What began as a payroll feature in an HR application has now become a robust ecosystem processing over ₦60 trillion annually—one that stands on the verge of reshaping the continent’s fintech landscape, Mr. Deremi Atanda, Managing Director/CEO of Remita Payment Services Limited, says in an exclusive interview that will grace the cover of eGovernance Nigeria Magazine.
The forthcoming edition of eGovernance Nigeria Magazine, a publication of the Technology Times media brand owned and operated by Digital Transformation Media Limited (DTML), will spotlight this extraordinary journey, and present Remita’s evolution as an inspiring tale that informs, educates, and entertains readers about indigenous innovation making global strides.
“We’ve become an ecosystem of rails, products, and services—robust,” Atanda, Managing Director/CEO of Remita explains during the exclusive interview with eGovernance Nigeria Magazine.
“Layering all of that with the many different customers we’ve had, typically every year we process in excess of maybe ₦60 trillion in transactions in Nigerian Naira. And this can only grow, especially as we begin to think of a vibrant Pan-African expansion. We’re at the fringe of that.”
In a compelling narrative that mixes grit, vision, and innovation, Atanda recounts Remita’s early days. “What many people know today as Remita actually started out as a feature within our HR/payroll application.
“You process salaries, and you just want to pay—so just remit salaries. And by the way, that’s where the name ‘Remita’ came from: Remittance. We just took out one ‘T’ and left it at ‘A.’”
Even the company’s logo carries symbolism of that transformation. “I don’t know if you’ve seen our logo—it has three dots, in ascending size. There are many stories in that logo. It started as a feature, and then we brought it out as a product,” Atanda explains.
Yet the road was not without its bumps. “The first time we brought it out as a product was to bid for the National Pension Commission. This was in 2004, with the PenCom Act.
“We packaged this into a product in less than two weeks to take care of end-to-end pensions as it was conceived. Trust me, that vision is still viable today. But we lost that bid.”
Undeterred, SystemSpecs pivoted. “We went back and said, ‘What do we do with this asset?’ If it’s not going to work for pensions, let it become a product. And that’s how we renamed pensions.com.ng as Remita, and it became a product.”
As demand grew, Remita expanded beyond payroll. “Some people want to do their own payroll and just make payments, so let them have a site to go to. Later, it evolved into not just payroll payments. People wanted to do other types of payments. If you want to do non-salary payments, you go to Remita,” he says.
Today, Remita has fully matured into a standalone company. “So those three things—feature, product, company. That’s been the evolution.” With a Tier 1 licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, Remita is now a fintech powerhouse. “We do switching, we do payment service provisioning, we do super agency, we do terminals—everything you can think about. We provide some basic services within the payment space, including payment service advisory.”
A lesser-known chapter of Remita’s growth includes building Nigeria’s first account-to-accountswitch. “Before TSA, we had built a rail—Nigeria’s first account-to-account switch, worked with all the banks. Not many people know that story. Account-to-account. The front of it, the application, and the rail—first of its kind.”
On the pivotal Treasury Single Account (TSA) deal with the Federal Government of Nigeria, Atanda reveals, “TSA was a happenstance. The government was looking to solve a problem, and we were looking to get regulated. It’s that term people use—when they say ‘luck,’ it’s just preparation meeting opportunity.”
Reflecting on the journey, he adds, “These have been some of those moments where you feel validated, where the visionary leadership that set the business up feels the vision is being realized.”
Today, Remita employs over 300 Nigerians and looks beyond its home shores. “The vision is huge, and we’re committed to that. So, we see exponential growth, and we’re positioning for that.”
Mr. Shina Badaru, Chairman of DTML, says Remita’s story is an inspirational example of local innovation with global relevance. “Remita’s success highlights the critical role of indigenous technology solutions in redefining Africa’s digital economy,” he says.
“As the cover story of the next issue of eGovernance Nigeria Magazine, we aim to showcase how homegrown innovation is not only solving problems locally but is also poised to transform markets across the African continent.”
According to Badaru, “Remita’s inspiring journey connects seamlessly with our article of faith to continue to showcase Nigeria’s growing contributions to the global technology industry.”
eGovernance Nigeria Magazine is a flagship DTML platform with operations across print, digital, TV, events, and e-commerce channels.
“This feature not only celebrates Remita’s evolution,” Badaru adds, “but also signals a pivotal shift in the narrative of Nigerian and African technology—from survival to scale, from local impact to continental transformation.”
As Remita sets its sights on Africa, it is poised to bring financial inclusion, digital infrastructure, and innovative fintech solutions to new and underserved markets. With a strong foundation and visionary leadership, the company is ready to deliver the next phase of its remarkable journey.
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