Awojobi: Structured Framework Will Drive Digital Skills Development  

Technical Adviser, Lagos State Safety Commission and Co-founder, Nest Technology Innovation Hub, Seun Awojobi, speaks on how Lagos government is leveraging technology to drive processes and the need for a structured framework that will enable tech hubs increase digital skills development across the country. Emma Okonji presents the excerpts:

How is Lagos State Safety Commission leveraging emerging technologies to drive processes that enhance citizens’ experience?

Technology is an enabler and Lagos State government is investing big in emerging technologies, through various agencies of government. The Lagos State Safety Commission, for instance, is an agency of government responsible for the safety of lives and property in the state and the agency is leveraging technology to drive its processes. Our mandate covers construction, manufacturing, hospitality, oil and gas, and general workplaces. The vision really is to ensure that every worker goes to work and returns home safely, free from accidents, incidents, and diseases and injuries. We carry out our work through what we call the four E’s programme, which include Evaluation, Engagement, Education and Enforcement.

What is your commission doing to harmonise the different databases of government that are in silos in order to create a single database for easy access?

When we got into office in 2019, there was no database of the organisations that we were meant to regulate. COVID, for us, was a game changer, because we realised that we didn’t have a single and extensive database. So under the leadership of the government of Lagos State, we created the database of all businesses within the event and hospitality space, which covered bars, lounges, hotels, event venues, gyms, clubs, and all the social centers in Lagos. So today, if you go on LASG Safety Reg, we have over 15,000 registered businesses. We have their locations, and all the necessary information about their businesses, and they have been verified.

Now, what that helps us to do is, should there be any mishap or any safety breach, is to enable us to locate the space with easy and we will be able as government, to trace who is responsible for the safety breach.  

Having gone digital, what were the responses from the people in terms of accepting the change from analogue to digital?

Before now, a lot of people did not want the change to digital, but that is where the world is heading to and we had to insist on digital transformation for the state.

Today, government activities are online and could be accessed online by the citizens, a development that has eased congestion of people trying to find their ways to government offices to carryout government transactions.

The time they spend commuting between their various locations and the government secretariat has been minimized because people can now access all government activities online.

With digitization of government activities, one thing is clear about the response time, which has become a lot easier. Lagos population is fast growing and we believe that we cannot keep getting everybody into one space. So if we’re able to drive one digital adoption, what happens is, first we see that our revenue as a state will go up because you’ve cut all those bottlenecks in accessing government services. So I can say for free that a lot of government agencies are digitizing their processes.

How has The Nest Technology Innovation Hub impacted on the citizens and the Nigerian economy, since its inception?

The Nest Technology Innovation Hub was set up to address the needs of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), knowing well that the growth of SMEs will add great value to digital transformation in Nigeria.

 So through training and support for SMEs, we ensure that SMES are able to stand the test of time and cater for the businesses.

To achieve this, we offer a range of support services, collaboration, business support, training, skills development, mentorship, providing an accelerator for new businesses to come in or existing businesses to come in and then scale.

The Nest is a technology hub that caters to a number of startups. A number of startups come through our space, access a lot of our services, and we offer a wide range of those services to a lot of the startups within our space.

Is The Nest Technology Innovation Hub part of the 3MTT initiative of the federal government to train three million technical talents across special skills in Nigeria and what is your take on the initiative?

The Next Technology Innovation Hub is one of the hubs selected by the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy to train Nigerians on digital skills, I must say that the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy is doing a fantastic job. I think his vision really is to ensure that Nigeria is an exporter of tech talents, which is one of the things that have happened in India. If you go to a number of countries around the world, you see that there are lots of Indians in their tech space. Nigeria has a growing population of youth, which the minister wants to strengthen by ensuring that at least we’re able to train three million people on technical talents.
I believe that the initiative will position Nigeria to attain a milestone that will open opportunities for our teaming youths, where they don’t even have to travel out of the country t get good jobs, and that’s the power of technology.
We already see it happening. A lot of people are doing remote work from Nigeria. Internet penetration is also going at an all-time high. So if you train them and they’re able to upskill, what will start to happen is that there will be a lot more remote working from Nigeria, where Nigerians will remain in Nigeria and do remote work in India, Ireland, the UK, the United States of America, and a number of other countries around the world where some of these tech talents can actually start to do their business, and even have gainful employment.

Resent statistics show that Nigeria and Africa have dearth of talents in the area of emerging technologies. What is Nest and other tech hubs doing to bridge the skills gap?

The Nest Technology Innovation Hub is doing great in this area. We’re an entrepreneurial support organisation. Now, hubs like us are also partnering with a lot of global and local organisations to carry out training. We are partnering with World Bank, European Union, among others to first do research to understand where the gap is and the type of gap we are looking to address, which could be a vocational gap, soft skill gap or technical gap.

 Now, when you first understand that from the point of research, it will be easy to proffer solutions to address the identified gap.

What could be responsible for the drop in funding of tech startups in the last 48 months?
It is true that the funding for startups has dropped in recent years, but that’s because it’s a global phenomenon. Now, what do we need to do? We need to look at our SMEs and ensure that we scale these SMEs to a point, because there are lots of opportunities for SMEs that can scale their business.

There are huge opportunities in motion graphics, animations, voiceover in the creative sector, programming languages, in coding, among others.
So part of what Nest Technology Innovation Hub does, is to partner with a lot of organisations like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), among others, to offer training sessions to Nigerian SMES and statrtups. We’re partnering with 54 collectives, some accelerators that we have identified different opportunities that they can tap into. The creative economy, for instance, is very huge. We see how much money comes from the film and movie industry. Now, all of these things are soft skills that should be learned.

What is Nest Technology Innovation Hub doing to bridge the gender gap in digital skills acquisition in Nigeria, where we have more males than females in the tech space?

Nest is doing a lot to bridge the existing gender skills gap. We have ‘The Girl Code Programme, designed for young ladies that are interested in a career within the tech space. The Girl Code Academy over the years has produced over a thousand graduates. These are people that have no prior idea of tech skills whatsoever before enrolling for the programme. They are trained for a period between three and six months, which is an intensive training on programming languages, coding, and several other tech skills.  A lot of them that passed through our training programmes, have earned very decent jobs in Google, in Amazon, and across various tech organisations in Nigeria and around the world. Some of them have gone ahead to establish their own businesses. Some of them are just using technology to leverage their current employment, also to boost themselves. So for us, we think it’s important to train women and girls in digital skills because if you build the woman, you build the nation.

So many hubs are springing up in Yaba, in Lagos, with just a few of them on the Lagos Island. What could be responsible for this?

The city of Yaba in Lagos, has so many statrtups and it has grown to become the home of startups in Nigeria, having trained several Unicorns that are doing great globally.

A lot of the big startups in Nigeria today, actually started from Yaba, and I think it’s attributed to the power of networking. The tech space in Nigeria has evolved greatly from a point where everybody was just trying their hands, to when there’s now a lot of policy focus and regulation, and to the startup bill being passed into law. And a lot more things are now happening around data protection.

How would you describe ICT growth in Nigeria?

ICT growth in Nigeria has been tremendous and the current Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, is also driving the growth in unique ways. He’s bringing everybody to the room, from the academia, to the operators, to the lawmakers, to see what part of the laws that could be changed. He’s meeting with academia to see what kind of policy focus we should have as a nation.

Again, if the regulation is right, there will be a better, bigger and stronger growth. I say this because the unicorns that have been produced from Nigeria’s tech space, are largely fintechs, playing in the financial technology space and this is because the financial sector is heavily regulated. So because of this, regulation has driven that growth. But look at other tech sectors that do not have as much regulation, like the agri-tech, where many of them have failed.
We have the people, we have the population, and we have the market size, but regulation is key because it will drive growth.

What in your view, should government do to support the growth of tech hubs in Nigeria?

I believe there’s a huge potential for the ICT sector to be one of the greatest employer of labour, and we see that through the three million tech talent training initiative of government, and a lot of hubs are benefiting from that initiative.

We also believe that there’s a huge opportunity for export of talents for Nigeria.

About 60 per cent of our population is youth. So, with the efforts of the federal government and its agencies, I think one of the things they need to do is to develop a structured framework for talent and skills development. Collaboration with other ministries will make a very big difference in training youths on digital skills.
So we need that handshake from the ICT sector into a number of sectors.

That is where the future is. So first, the ministry needs to have a structured development plan with other ministries. I think the government also needs to work with a lot of Entrepreneurial Support Organizations (ESOs), which Nest Technology Innovation Hub is one of them, in order to steer that growth.