East Africa’s largest telecoms company, Safaricom has launched its new video streaming platform, Baze – in Kenya. This subscription-based mobile-first service is expected to offer a wide selection of local and regional short-form videos in entertainment, music, news and sports. Safaricom says it is placing the entertainment Kenyans want at their fingertips while providing local content creators with an additional platform to share their stories and monetize their content.
Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa
“The new service will offer customers a wide variety of video content and provide content creators an additional platform to monetize their content. We are looking to get the best forms of monetisation for creators and to give users a worry free experience when using the platform” says Sylvia Mulinge.
“As we launch Baze, we are also pleased to announce that the platform will host new content not seen anywhere including a brand-new Kenyan action drama, Mission to Rescue which will be available exclusively on Baze for 3 months before being unveiled anywhere else.”
Peter Ndegwa, CEO of Safaricom, says “smartphones and the internet have become critical in our day to day lives, empowering us in different ways by connecting us to more opportunities. The 90-day free data campaign seeks to ensure that no customer is left behind by ensuring that all our customers can now access the internet, even at no cost”.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
The adoption of artificial intelligence technology could potentially deliver up to $1 trillion in additional value each year for banks, according to global consultancy McKinsey. This is as rapid data analysis can also help lenders to make quicker decisions on credit applications.
Artificial intelligence
Traditional banks are under pressure to improve customer engagement amid a growing threat posed by digital-only lenders and technology companies looking to move into financial services.
AI technology is expected to boost revenue through the increased personalisation of customer services and lower costs due to the efficiency gains of higher automation, fewer errors and better resource use.
Lenders could also uncover new opportunities based on an improved ability to generate insights from vast troves of data, the consultancy’s Building the AI bank of the future report said.
“As customers conduct a growing share of their daily transactions through digital channels, they are becoming accustomed to the ease, speed and personalised service offered by digitally native [companies], and their expectations of banks are rising,” said senior partner Renny Thomas.
“To compete and thrive in this challenging environment, traditional banks will need to build a new value proposition founded upon leading-edge AI and analytics capabilities. They must become AI-first in their strategy and operations.”
There has been an improvement in operating conditions for lenders as businesses stabilise and economies around the world recover from the coronavirus-induced slowdown.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had last month upgraded its global economic growth forecast for this year to 6 per cent. The world economy shrunk by 3.3 per cent last year.
Many banks have struggled to scale up their adoption of AI technology because they lack a clear strategy and have fragmented data assets, an inflexible and investment-starved technology core or outmoded operating models, the report said.
To compete and thrive in this challenging environment, traditional banks will need to build a new value proposition founded upon leading-edge AI and analytics capabilities.
“Incumbent banks must become AI-first institutions,” said McKinsey, particularly as they face a growing threat from big technology companies looking to move into financial services.
Other challenges include greater competition from neo-banks, increased customer expectations and digital ecosystems looking to disrupt traditional financial services, according to the report.
However, the use of advanced AI technology by leading financial institutions is steadily increasing. About six in 10 respondents to McKinsey’s Global AI Survey report on financial services said their companies had embedded at least one AI capability.
“To craft and deliver intelligent propositions, banks need to free themselves from a product-centric view and instead adopt a customer-centric view, which starts with understanding customer needs,” the report said.
Lenders are already using AI for split-second loan approvals, biometric authentication and to power online assistants, helping to improve customer interaction and reduce costs.
Banks can also use AI to offer services such as fee-reduction recommendations, which are based on analysis of past transactions, and budgeting and planning tools that can help customers achieve their financial goals.
“Rapid analysis of transaction history enables banks to inform individual customers about their potential to reduce fees. Budgeting tools can help customers to improve financial discipline,” the report said.
“By integrating systems across the enterprise, banks can analyse relevant data to generate a comprehensive view of a customer’s total inflows and outflows and offer advice for balancing daily and annual spending with wealth-building goals.”
Lenders are also increasingly relying on AI and analytics capabilities to drive customer acquisition, make credit decisions and improve monitoring and debt collection.
The use of advanced analytics allows banks to deliver highly personalised offers directly on a landing page for new customers.
They can also better understand client needs by analysing their browsing history, how they arrive at a website and making use of their social media data to form an initial profile that includes a customer’s financial position and provisional credit scoring, McKinsey said.
AI-first banks can streamline lending processes by using the technology and “near-real-time analysis of customer data to generate prompt credit decisions for retailers, small and medium-sized enterprises and corporate clients”, it said.
Such banks can also qualify new customers for credit services, determine loan limits and pricing and reduce the risk of fraud, the report said.
By automating as much of the lending procedure as possible, banks can strengthen each customer’s experience through quick loan approvals and fund disbursements, fewer document requests and credit offers tailored to their needs, McKinsey said.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Telkom has integrated the T-kash, its Kenyan-based mobile money platform into the governments’ digital services platform, Citizen. Sources close to the telco said that this partnership will “enable T-kash customers to pay for National and County Government Services that are able to be found on the portal”.
The list of services users will be able to pay for are those offered by the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA); Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Business Registration Service and Immigration Services. The list also includes services under the Civil Registration Department, Office of the Attorney General, Higher Education Loans Board (HELB), The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), National Construction Authority, Kenya Film Commission, National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), Kenya National Qualifications Authority (KNQA) and the Ministries of Land and Mining.
Mugo Kibati, CEO, Telkom
Telkom’s CEO, Mugo Kibati describes the development as a “Strategic partnership will help broaden the eCitizen’s revenue collection options, and improve services to Kenyans, as well as cement our ambition to be the technology partner of choice to our consumers, private and public sector clients.”
“Financial services, partnerships and digitisation form part of Telkom’s focus areas. In this strategic direction, Telkom seeks to enrich its financial services offering in response to the evolving digital lifestyle of the consumer, where convenience and simplicity are paramount.”
“This is a good opportunity for Telkom that will enable us to provide roaming services to previously excluded customers, resulting in an improvement in our overall customer experience,” says Andrew Dawson, Executive Product Portfolio Management at Telkom.
“We will launch in two phases, by first opening up roaming to the countries and network operators listed below and as a second phase, we will target all neighbouring countries within the SADC region.”
The telco goes on to say that it is ready to expand this service offering to new markets and territories despite a significant decline in our roaming traffic and revenues. It hopes that its prepaid customer base – which exceeds 12 million – can add real value because the rates will essentially be similar to post-paid rates.
“As such, we are thrilled to introduce this proposition to our prepaid customers. We have all the tools in place to succeed, including global supplier competencies, IT services and network support,” concludes Dawson.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Uploading personal photos to the internet can feel like letting go. Who else will have access to them, what will they do with them—and which machine-learning algorithms will they help train?
The company Clearview has already supplied US law enforcement agencies with a facial recognition tool trained on photos of millions of people scraped from the public web. But that was likely just the start. Anyone with basic coding skills can now develop facial recognition software, meaning there is more potential than ever to abuse the tech in everything from sexual harassment and racial discrimination to political oppression and religious persecution.
The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy.
A number of AI researchers are pushing back and developing ways to make sure AIs can’t learn from personal data. Two of the latest are being presented this week at ICLR, a leading AI conference.
“I don’t like people taking things from me that they’re not supposed to have,” says Emily Wenger at the University of Chicago, who developed one of the first tools to do this, called Fawkes, with her colleagues last summer: “I guess a lot of us had a similar idea at the same time.”
Data poisoning isn’t new. Actions like deleting data that companies have on you, or deliberatly polluting data sets with fake examples, can make it harder for companies to train accurate machine-learning models. But these efforts typically require collective action, with hundreds or thousands of people participating, to make an impact. The difference with these new techniques is that they work on a single person’s photos.
“This technology can be used as a key by an individual to lock their data,” says Sarah Erfani at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “It’s a new frontline defense for protecting people’s digital rights in the age of AI.”
Hiding in plain sight
Most of the tools, including Fawkes, take the same basic approach. They make tiny changes to an image that are hard to spot with a human eye but throw off an AI, causing it to misidentify who or what it sees in a photo. This technique is very close to a kind of adversarial attack, where small alterations to input data can force deep-learning models to make big mistakes.
Give Fawkes a bunch of selfies and it will add pixel-level perturbations to the images that stop state-of-the-art facial recognition systems from identifying who is in the photos. Unlike previous ways of doing this, such as wearing AI-spoofing face paint, it leaves the images apparently unchanged to humans.
Wenger and her colleagues tested their tool against several widely used commercial facial recognition systems, including Amazon’s AWS Rekognition, Microsoft Azure, and Face++, developed by the Chinese company Megvii Technology. In a small experiment with a data set of 50 images, Fawkes was 100% effective against all of them, preventing models trained on tweaked images of people from later recognizing images of those people in fresh images. The doctored training images had stopped the tools from forming an accurate representation of those people’s faces.
Fawkes has already been downloaded nearly half a million times from the project website. One user has also built an online version, making it even easier for people to use (though Wenger won’t vouch for third parties using the code, warning: “You don’t know what’s happening to your data while that person is processing it”). There’s not yet a phone app, but there’s nothing stopping somebody from making one, says Wenger.
Fawkes may keep a new facial recognition system from recognizing you—the next Clearview, say. But it won’t sabotage existing systems that have been trained on your unprotected images already. The tech is improving all the time, however. Wenger thinks that a tool developed by Valeriia Cherepanova and her colleagues at the University of Maryland, one of the teams at ICLR this week, might address this issue.
Called LowKey, the tool expands on Fawkes by applying perturbations to images based on a stronger kind of adversarial attack, which also fools pretrained commercial models. Like Fawkes, LowKey is also available online.
Erfani and her colleagues have added an even bigger twist. Together with Daniel Ma at Deakin University, and researchers at the University of Melbourne and Peking University in Beijing, Erfani has developed a way to turn images into “unlearnable examples,” which effectively make an AI ignore your selfies entirely. “I think it’s great,” says Wenger. “Fawkes trains a model to learn something wrong about you, and this tool trains a model to learn nothing about you.”
Images of me scraped from the web (top) are turned into unlearnable examples (bottom) that a facial recognition system will ignore. (Credit to Sarah Erfani, Daniel Ma and colleagues)
Unlike Fawkes and its followers, unlearnable examples are not based on adversarial attacks. Instead of introducing changes to an image that force an AI to make a mistake, Ma’s team adds tiny changes that trick an AI into ignoring it during training. When presented with the image later, its evaluation of what’s in it will be no better than a random guess.
Unlearnable examples may prove more effective than adversarial attacks, since they cannot be trained against. The more adversarial examples an AI sees, the better it gets at recognizing them. But because Erfani and her colleagues stop an AI from training on images in the first place, they claim this won’t happen with unlearnable examples.
Wenger is resigned to an ongoing battle, however. Her team recently noticed that Microsoft Azure’s facial recognition service was no longer spoofed by some of their images. “It suddenly somehow became robust to cloaked images that we had generated,” she says. “We don’t know what happened.”
Microsoft may have changed its algorithm, or the AI may simply have seen so many images from people using Fawkes that it learned to recognize them. Either way, Wenger’s team released an update to their tool that works against Azure again. “This is another cat-and-mouse arms race,” she says.
For Wenger, this is the story of the internet. “Companies like Clearview are capitalizing on what they perceive to be freely available data and using it to do whatever they want,” she says.”
Regulation might help in the long run, but that won’t stop companies from exploiting loopholes. “There’s always going to be a disconnect between what is legally acceptable and what people actually want,” she says. “Tools like Fawkes fill that gap.”
“Let’s give people some power that they didn’t have before,” she says.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Experts have warned of a new, and viral, phishing scheme that has seen fraudsters putting mobile users’ financial information at risk. Global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky revealed that attackers, typically under the guise of a postal service, request a small sum of money for the shipping costs of a package. Once a user clicks on an SMS authentication code for the money transfer, the device is compromised thereby enabling increasingly larger amounts of money to be stolen.
Cybersecurity
“Because it is not a complex phishing attack, it has already gained traction in other parts of the world with fraudsters able to pose as virtually any service provider from prepaid electricity to airtime, naming just a few examples,” says Bethwel Opil, Enterprise Sales Manager at Kaspersky in Africa.
Phishing, regardless of the scheme used, is a significant issue that affects consumers and corporations alike. And while Kaspersky research in 2020 shows that the most frequent targets of phishing attacks were online stores (just over 18%), every person must remain vigilant against this scourge.
“Whether it is phishing emails or SMS messages, attackers are getting increasingly sophisticated. The poor grammar and spelling errors of the past have all but been eliminated and replaced with clever copy that can trick even the most experienced mobile user,” he adds.
While the best form of defence is to install security software, that includes anti-virus, anti-malware, and anti-spam technology, on every device connected to the Internet, users can also delete unsolicited text messages or emails without opening them. They must also consider blocking those numbers or email addresses that perpetuate the phishing messages.
“In the connected world, phishing, like any other form of malware, is here to stay. Combining the best technology solutions with proven best practice becomes invaluable to mitigate against the potential risk of compromise,” concludes Opil.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Many in the payments industry have been predicting so for years, that digital payments are inevitable for the future. It’s only a matter of time, the experts said over and over again. But while the technology has continued to take over commerce worldwide, digital payments in Africa have not neared anywhere close to global adoption rates.
The challenges with developing the digital payment sector in the sub-Saharan continent are well catalogued. Challenging infrastructure, low income levels and the well-established virtues of cash – immediacy, ubiquity and trust – have all constrained the development of electronic payments in African countries.
Hany Fekry, Regional President – Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, Network International
In Nigeria, cash has remained king and financial services have remained stagnant despite decades of efforts to do away with old-fashioned paper money.
That was, until COVID-19 hit. In the aftermath of the virus outbreak, we have seen digital banking emerge across Nigeria with heightening consumer demand for efficient ways to access banking records and complete financial transactions outside physical branches and traditional card payments.
The fear of paper currency as a carrier for coronavirus has jolted the banking sector into massive digital disruption, signalling a powerful inflection point for payments in Africa. And we see this as just the start of the shift in how consumers, merchants and issuers choose to transact.
Online deposit, mobile banking apps, cards and e-bills payment have become the norm overnight, with card and virtual card payments becoming one of the most important non-cash transaction channels.
With the power to oust physical currency, the potential of plastic as a medium of exchange is unrivalled. Banks that build their Issuance business now not only contribute to the foundation on which this transition can take place, but also position themselves to reap the rewards of this seismic fundamental shift.
As banks work to respond to the increased demand for digital payments induced by the pandemic, banks need to tap into the considerable advantages held by our African markets including our youth demographic.
While the rest of the world is ageing, the median age of the population in Africa is just 19, compared to Europe at 42, for example. The young people of Africa have been increasingly engaging with financial products in different ways, ready to trail blaze the use of modern payment services.
This proliferation of digital banking prompted Network International to gain first mover advantage and lead the transformation in Nigeria by partnering and providing issuance solutions to financial institutions to help them respond to the changing needs of their customers.
Additionally, in the current economic climate, banks in Nigeria have been able to tap into our experience and expertise in creating virtual card solutions (VC) for emerging markets. Issuers also benefit from Network’s advanced digital infrastructure and robust security protocols, avoiding the need to invest in expensive card management infrastructure.
As we power digital transactions with the capability to issue virtual cards through API Integration connected to existing channels of financial institutions such as mobile, Internet banking and ATMs, we believe the potential exists for banks to multiply returns from virtual card Issuance. Banks that incorporate virtual payment cards into their business strategy also gain greater opportunity to cross-sell other products and services.
Virtual card issuance has the potential to transform into a strategic, high value generating asset for banks, while allowing bank customers to enjoy the convenience, flexibility, safety and security of cashless payments to fulfil their financial and lifestyle needs.
We remain committed to fostering agile innovation by deploying our best-in-class technology to support digital and financial inclusion of Nigerian consumers and businesses. Because, ultimately, furthering digital adoption is going to be dependent on the people, platform and partnership.
Cash may not be gone just yet. But with this fundamental change accelerated by Covid-19, our payments ecosystem has now truly been ordained and will have profound implications for people, businesses, and society.
Hany Fekry is the Regional President – Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, Network International (www.Network.ae)
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
East Africa’s leading Telecoms Company along with its parent company Vodafone has been awarded one operating licence by Ethiopia’s telecommunications regulator at the cost of $850 million. This was announced via a tweet by the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed saying that “The Council of Ministers has unanimously made a historic decision today allowing Ethiopian Communications Authority to grant a new nationwide telecom license to the Global Partnership for Ethiopia which offered the highest licensing fee and a very solid investment case.”
Dr. Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister
The consortium – led by Safaricom – plans to invest up to $8.5 billion in infrastructure as well as create up to one and a half million jobs.
Ahmed adds, “With over $8 billion total investment, this will be the single largest FDI into Ethiopia to date. Our desire to take Ethiopia fully digital is on track. I would like to thank all that have taken part in this and for pulling off a very transparent and effective process.”
At this stage, there is still one more telco license up for grabs. Balcha Reba, director-general of the Ethiopian Communications Authority, says they plan to open a bid for this license soon and Africa’s largest telecoms company MTN is expected to bid on the remaining license.
MTN Group initially bid $600 million on the first available operating licence, an amount far below what was paid by Safaricom. However, this does not mean the telco is out of the running just yet.
Finance ministry adviser Brook Taye says “we always wanted quality providers and this is what we have received,” adds Taye. “These are two African giants — the Safaricom and MTN — either one or two of the operators will get a licence in Ethiopia.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
To unlock their mobile devices more simply, users are now favoring biometric authentication, such as fingerprint sensors, which also reduce the cognitive burden of remembering multiple long passwords.
Proper use of biometrics increases security, too. Passwords are easy to steal; faking biometrics is much more difficult. The technology is ideal for providing role-based access controls — and a high level of trust for business users.
Here’s a detailed look at how biometrics work, how data encryption fits in and what business leaders should look for to maintain strong security while delivering the convenience users want:
Biometrics for Authentication in Android
How biometrics work
Unlike passwords or PINs, biometrics aren’t saved in the network or passed around between devices and servers. Instead, biometrics protects other authentication information — usually a digital certificate or private key — and it’s this protected information that is actually used to verify the user.
Android v6 (“Marshmallow”) introduced a standardized API for biometrics, focusing on fingerprint readers. Since then, a new biometric authentication API has been introduced to replace it. The update, introduced in Android v8 (“Oreo”), provides a more flexible and varied foundation for supporting both fingerprint and nonfingerprint methods of biometric authentication, including nonstandard biometric options with third-party apps. As a result, companies looking to leverage biometric authentication can depend on a common set of services, high-level security and consistent user experience across all platforms.
In the Android OS, fingerprint biometrics are required to be stored in the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), where the information is encrypted and kept in a separate part of the smartphone, completely inaccessible to the regular OS. It can’t even be exported. Android can ask the TEE to verify a user’s identity using biometrics, but it can’t extract the biometric information. In other words, when the user stores their biometric information, such as a fingerprint, they’re not sharing that information outside of their own smartphone or tablet; they’re just establishing a way to identify themselves to their device.
Implementing biometrics in the enterprise
Fingerprint unlocking for personal phones is just one of many use cases for biometrics. Companies can think much farther. Some password vaults, for example, can be unlocked with biometrics, simplifying the process and encouraging employees to store their passwords safely.
An even more advanced use case combines the TEE, biometrics and app-specific authentication information to allow users to log into online services with their fingerprint. The Fast Identification Online (FIDO) Alliance has developed a standard to optimize the process of converting an end user’s biometric authentication into app-friendly user authentication. Android versions 7.0 (“Nougat”) and after are certified as compatible with FIDO2.
While Android, the client, is important, it’s even more critical that FIDO Alliance’s FIDO2 protocols are supported by online services and browsers. Major vendors — including Google, Dropbox, Facebook, Paypal, Salesforce, Bitbucket and GitHub — as well as major browsers, such as Google Chrome, all support FIDO2.
Samsung Pass is an example of a password management service that’s based on the FIDO specifications. Samsung Pass enables strong authentication across different apps using biometrics combined with a cloud-based service, provided by Samsung. Smartphone users can lock up multiple sets of authentication credentials — from both public and private enterprise services — and protect them with their fingerprint. Samsung Pass simplifies the user experience while using highly secure authentication systems based on digital certificates, so end users can keep their strong authentication credentials locked up with biometrics, reduce their use of insecure passwords and speed up their app authentication.
Advancing and evaluating biometric technology
Biometric technology continues to evolve, getting better and better over time. Samsung’s Galaxy S21 and Galaxy Tab S7 series, for example, include an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. The sensor detects the ridges and valleys of the fingerprint by bouncing off ultrasonic pulses. This new style of fingerprint reader is fast, and popular with users, because it offers even speedier authentication and increased convenience.
Addressing standards
Businesses with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) or Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) policies should carefully evaluate biometrics on Android smartphones when choosing vendors and technologies. This will reduce the risk of introducing the kinds of security vulnerabilities that came with the initial implementations of fingerprint readers. Following standards such as FIDO’s U2F will also help lower the risk of insecure implementation.
When enabling newer biometrics, look for a clear statement from the manufacturer on how the data is stored and verified. Data should be stored in an encrypted or hashed format, eliminating the possibility of decryption, even by privileged applications.
Android devices should make use of specialized hardware and TEE with live biometric data to ensure malware can’t tamper with the data or interfere with the process — creating safer options for businesses interested in top security measures for their growing workforce
Joel Snyder, Ph.D., is a senior IT consultant with 30 years of practice. An internationally recognized expert in the areas of security, messaging and networks, Snyder is a popular speaker and author and is known for his unbiased and comprehensive tests of security and networking products. His clients include major organizations on six continents.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Google and Shopify minted a new integration deal to bring Shopify merchants to Google’s “shopping journeys” as the search giant forges ahead with its ecommerce ambitions, per TechCrunch. Google says it has over a billion of these journeys every day, as customers go through Search, Maps, Images, Lens, and YouTube seeking out products and services. Merchants will have the opportunity to place their products across these journeys seamlessly with the new integration.
Google Shopify
The Shopify deal helps Google to expand its ecommerce push. Shopify brings with it 1.7 million merchants who can sell their products across Google’s shopping journeys, including Google Shopping for free, per Google’s April 2020 update. At the time, Google shifted its Shopping tab to show algorithmically placed results more than paid-product results, which pushed an 80% increase in the number of merchants using the feature, per the company. And, it’s now offering improved analytics for brands that work with its shopping features, namely through its “Shopping Graph.” The tool will aggregate data from websites, price reviews, videos, and product data taken directly from brands and retailers to offer consumers an organized way to discern the best place to find a product, reviews on said product, best prices, and more. This tool will span all of Google’s platforms, and the Shopify deal will help Google’s quest to ascertain the expansive trove of data it’s looking for because it brings so many merchants with it—of course, in order for Graph to be useful, Google needs as many merchants on board as possible.
Amazon has been steadily gaining on Google in terms of ad dollars and, consequently, has ramped up efforts to both pull marketers back in and to up the ante when it comes to beneficial offerings for brands—like these direct paths for ecommerce. Amazon has siphoned a decent share of revenues from digital ad markets at home and worldwide in recent years. The ecommerce giant netted 10.3% of total digital ad spending in the US in 2020, and 5.2% of worldwide total digital ad spend, per our estimates, up from 7.8% and 3.8% respectively in 2019. For context, in 2020, Google took 28.9% of US digital ad revenue share and 27.5% worldwide, compared to 31.6% and 28.9% of shares in 2019 respectively. While Google still holds a solid upper hand, the company has seen fit to ramp up its ecommerce offerings to compete in a different vein and keep up with the general consumer trend toward ecommerce. As more dollars flow to ecommerce, digital advertising will pick up more share of total spend, and as eMarketer senior forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence Eric Haggstrom pointed out, more platforms that offer that ad inventory will want to creep closer to the sale—which explains why Google, and Facebook, and Instagram (among others) are pushing shopping options so aggressively.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Over the past year or so, digital transformation accelerated at an unprecedented rate in societies around the world. Whether we were working, learning, or staying in touch with friends and family, being online became more critical than ever.
Even as vast numbers of people were adapting to their new realities, it became increasingly apparent that equally large numbers of people were shut out from being able to do so.
Leo Chen, President of Huawei Southern Africa
In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, approximately 800-million people are not connected to the mobile internet. Of those, some 520-million can access the mobile internet but don’t, because of factors such as smartphone penetration and lack of skills while 270-million cannot access the mobile internet because they don’t have the requisite coverage. Across the region, 4G broadband coverage is at just 21%.
The figures are even starker when it comes to fixed-line internet connectivity. According to figures from research firm Ovum, there are just 6.6-million fixed-line internet subscriptions in Sub-Saharan Africa. While numbers are projected to grow three-fold by 2023, that still represents a small fraction of the region’s population. Those figures make it clear that the region needs to address a major internet infrastructure shortfall.
The benefits of growing internet accessibility and access are obvious. In 2019, in Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 650 000 jobs were supported directly by the mobile ecosystem and more than 1.4-million informal jobs in 2019. It also contributed more than US$17-billion to public funding through the course of the year.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has also established that a 10% increase in mobile broadband penetration in Africa would generate an increase of 2.5% in GDP per capita. That’s to say nothing of the benefits that better and more affordable mobile internet can have on education, healthcare, and government services.
With easily accessible internet connectivity, people can search for jobs, gain new skills, and access government services without having to travel to a physical location and potentially stand in long queues.
As we have seen, the pandemic has caused economic and social devastation and changed the way we live, work, study and socialize, bringing about an era of social distancing. One of the most significant changes is the acceleration of digital transformation. African policymakers have realised that access to broadband is critical for mitigating the effects of the pandemic and boosting economic recovery in the post-COVID era.
With changes in people’s behaviours and mindsets, broadband will also continue to provide opportunities for African countries to leapfrog obstacles to sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development.
Of course, the responsibility to create access doesn’t lie with the government alone. Corporates also have a role to play. For example, Huawei has backed a number of initiatives that aim to help grow access in areas where it’s needed most.
From a healthcare perspective, meanwhile, with broadband connections, Lifebank, a pioneering Nigerian startup delivers blood and other essential medical supplies to hospitals. By keeping the startup and its riders connected, we can ensure that hospitals get urgent supplies when they are needed.
These kinds of projects, however, only serve to illustrate how much need for accessible, affordable broadband there really is across Sub-Saharan Africa. They represent a glimpse at the kind of access that everyone should have and which players across society should look to provide.
For more than a decade, the United Nations has recognised that the internet is a catalyst for sustainable development. As the events of the past year or so have shown, however, far too many people are unable to enjoy those rights because they lack access and connectivity. We will all benefit from widening access and bridging this divide. There is no question that it should be a major priority for governments, corporates, and civil society players alike and that it should be an ongoing one.
Chen is the President of Huawei Southern Africa
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
