• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Tech that will change Nigerian lives in 2023

Tech that will change Nigerian lives in 2023

2023 is a year many companies in different sectors of the Nigerian economy are hoping to have something better to offer compared to what 2022 brought.

A BusinessDay article described 2022 as “a year to forget in Nigeria”. Many startups, oil companies, telecom operators, healthcare providers, banking institutions, and many others would easily agree. There are indeed several things to forget including technological innovations that didn’t turn out the way people expected and bitcoin investments that went down the drain on the collapse of Luna and FTX.

For example, Nestcoin, a crypto firm founded less than one year ago, would wish they hadn’t invested so much money in FTX.

54gene made a lot of money from the COVID-19 pandemic and probably depended too much on the pandemic to keep giving. The company wasn’t prepared, with countries making efforts to move on from the pandemic. The result has been mass layoffs and the founding CEO stepping down.

Five tech companies were forced to lay off staff by the end of the year. Globally, over 150,000 tech workers were laid off.

Also in 2022, telecommunications companies like MTN and Airtel managed to recover from the massive 2021 subscriber drop following the temporary ban of SIM registration. The two telcos also secured 5G licences. MTN launched 5G services in 2022, and Airtel is expected to kick off its service in 2023. The industry leaped to 152.3 million internet subscriptions in November from 143.2 million in January.

Globacom didn’t get a 5G licence neither did its payment service bank make a splash in mobile money but it beat Airtel to the second position of the largest telcos in Nigeria.

But the same can’t be said of 9mobile. The notable thing the telco has done was the launch of its 9PSB service in 2021 and a desperate push to increase its dwindling subscribers. 9mobile’s internet subscriber base stood at 4.5 million in November 2022, down from 5.7 million in January.

2023 has kicked off with anticipation for many companies; however, some experts say a lot is riding on the outcome of the 2023 elections. The loss of foreign investors’ confidence many companies experienced can change should the elections be free and fair.

BusinessDay looked at the tech innovations that could change the lives of Nigerians in 2023.

BVAS machines

Nigeria would go to the polls in February to elect the next president of the country. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) is not the first technology that would be deployed to elections in Nigeria. The country first deployed technology in an election in 2011 while the smartcard reader was deployed in 2019. The BVAS, however, is the first advanced technology that is expected to play a pivotal role in the outcome of the election.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said it will deploy a total of 176,845 BVAS machines for the February 2023 general elections. The commission would also provide 17,618 BVAS machines for backup, with two devices per registration area.

BVAS usage entails either scanning the barcode/QR code on the permanent voter card/voter’s register or entering the last six digits of the voter identity number or typing in the last name of the voter by the assistant presiding officer to verify and authenticate the voter.

BVAS also acts as the INEC Voter Enrolment Device during voter registration. Its usage also eliminates the use of incident forms during accreditation on an election day. The success of the BVAS in the election would largely depend on the performance of telecom infrastructure. It would also depend on the availability of electricity.

Solar and lithium battery

Nigeria has had an abysmal outing in the power sector in its efforts to increase on-grid capacity. The country generates below 4,800MW, and the per capita electricity usage is 136 KW/h, one of the lowest in the world.

Solar and lithium batteries have since become a viable alternative for many families and organisations. Nigeria recorded 38 percent growth in the sale of off-grid products to 628,000 in 2021, according to REN21, a think tank’s renewable energy report.

The report noted that the off-grid market is growing through the Nigeria Electrification Project, whose objective is to electrify 300,000 households and 30,000 local enterprises through private sector-driven solar-hybrid mini-grids by 2023.

The cost of the products in the market would need to be reduced for many more Nigerians to embrace solar or inverter batteries. The volume-weighted average price of lithium-ion battery packs across all industries increased to $151 per kilowatt-hour in 2022, a 7 percent increase from last year. BloombergNEF forecasts prices could continue rising in 2023.

Adewale Adetugbo, a fintech expert, said 24/7 electricity will be the biggest achievement for many companies. Solving alternative power generation could help many companies recoup some of the losses they suffered in 2022 and position themselves for a comeback in 2023.

A regulated crypto market

Thanks to the Godwin Emefiele-led Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the crypto industry operated like an underground market in 2022.

While financial institutions were banned from doing business with crypto exchanges and crypto-related businesses, operators found a way to survive.

One important lifeline for the market has been the Nigerian government inability to pick a side and stick to it. While the CBN stands rigid in opposition to cryptocurrencies, the government is very reluctant to support a ban of the market. Many top government officials including the Vice President back a regulated market.

In December 2022, Babangida Ibrahim, chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Capital Market and Institutions, said the chamber would soon pass a law that will allow digital currencies in Nigeria.

The Investments and Securities Act, 2007 (Amendment) Bill, when passed and signed into law, will allow the Securities and Exchange Commission to recognise cryptocurrency and other digital funds as capital for investment. If achieved before their tenure expires in May 2023, it might be the perfect send-off gift from the lawmakers to the struggling crypto market and millions of Nigerians whose investments in crypto have taken a hit due to the uncertainty.

Fintech collaboration and mergers

For many years, the fintech segment of the emerging tech ecosystem in Nigeria has set the pace in funding activities, accounting for a major chunk of all funds raised. A Nigerian fintech company, Flutterwave, emerged the most valuable tech startup in Africa with a $3 billion valuation after raising $250 million in 2022.

Nonetheless, some experts still argue that the size of the fintech companies needs to be grown to face the evolving competitive landscape.

Tayo Oviosu, founder and CEO of Paga Communications, a payment provider, said that in 2023, this would be achieved through collaboration between fintech and fintech companies.

“Startups will focus on smaller, more niche, opportunities that build upon the infrastructure already created,” he said in the Economist. “For example, a company such as Doroki or Yoco to emulate Square, a small business payments platform, does not need to reinvent the wheel on core payments infrastructure, but can instead use the digital pipes laid by other businesses. This way resources can be focused on the needs of the SMEs being served.”

Eliot Pence, co-founder of Tofino Capital, a venture capital fund that launched its $10 million fund in 2022 to back startups in Africa and other regions, predicts mergers and acquisitions. He sees Branch International, a global payment company, acquiring Nigerian-based digital bank Carbon. Carbon acquired Amplify Pay in 2019, which also necessitated its rebrand from a lending platform to a digital bank, offering more payment services. At its 10th anniversary in 2022, the company announced that it hit N3.9 billion in revenue and N1.3 billion operating income in the first half of the year.

More AI in the workplace

Thousands of tech workers may have lost their jobs in 2022, but don’t expect companies that laid them off to be returning to the job markets very soon.

A significant portion of them are turning to artificial intelligence to fill the gaps left behind by human beings. That’s true also for Nigerian tech companies.

Ngozi Dozie, co-founder of Carbon, posted on Tuesday an experiment with an AI graphic designer called Dalle. According to him, Dalle can produce three original graphic designs in three minutes, many times faster than the human graphic artist would.

“At the extreme, we may no longer need graphic designers; more likely this will help graphic designers in being more efficient right now and helping in generating ideas. But it’s a game changer and allows startups with nothing to start quickly – and these are free for now,” he said in a post.

Increasingly, founders are turning to AI such as ChatGPT for insights on how consumers perceive their brands. ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.