The evolution of artificial intelligence, robotics, analytics and other areas of technology has led to a disruption of various sectors of the economy. Aware of this disruption, Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN) seeks to equip young people with 21st century.
Could you explain what JAN is all about and what has been your experience since you joined JAN?
Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN), we believe that building a stronger future for our country is a collective responsibility. We must make deliberate investments not only to upskill our youths and provide them access to technology but also in fostering an entrepreneurship, resilient and innovative mind-set in them. JAN embodies this commitment to upskilling our youths, hence the volunteers, sponsors and supporters they have garnered over the last 20 years.
JAN has come a long way in 20 years, from a period where companies pay lip service to CSR or have any volunteering culture to now, where JAN has pioneered impactful CSR and the volunteering culture in Nigeria. JAN is dedicated to teaching youth about entrepreneurship, financial literacy, the working of the modern economics, digital literacy and continues to run programmes that teaches young people how to impact the community in a sustainable manner by running businesses with a purpose, giving back to the community, driving real change and generally making the world a better place.
According to the Global Skills Index released by Coursera, about two-thirds of the world’s population is lagging in critical skills and about 90 percent of this group can be found in developing economies. It is not surprising that in Nigeria we continue to lag in critical skills, given the low quality of pedagogy in our institutions, poor funding, inadequate resources and failing education infrastructure.
what is your relationship with JAN?
I am one of 10 Board Members responsible for providing strategic guidance, direction setting, financial resources and volunteers to Junior Achievement’s operations in Nigeria and ensuring that JA complies with applicable regulatory standards and the high-quality standards associated with the JA brand worldwide. My engagement with JAN goes back eighteen years ago, from when I was a young consultant in Andersen Consulting. I became a Board Member during my previous role as country managing director, Accenture Nigeria.
Read also: Youths must embrace entrepreneurship to foster wealth creation – minister
Automation has always been accompanied by a loss of jobs. Considering the unemployment rate in Nigeria (23.1 percent), why should companies embrace AI?
We do not have a choice than to embrace change because AI would come whether we deliberately embrace it or not, a smarter question we should ask is ‘how to prepare for it’. Out of about 7 billion people in the world, Nigerians are only about 200 million and if we refuse to evolve with the rest of the world, no one will wait for us. So, it would be in our interest to prepare for it. And on job losses and automation, I would argue that automation has a net positive effect although it affects individuals in different ways. Some individuals may lose their jobs while some individuals may get better jobs but, on the aggregate, the world has always been better because of automation. This is the fourth industrial revolution, we started off as farmers and them move to the industrial age and people lost jobs but, on the aggregate, the industrial age expanded territories, conquered new markets, created new products and also created new kind of jobs. In the United States of America, with a population of about 330 million, less than two percent of the population are in the agriculture sector, gradually declining as the years go by but interestingly, agricultural yield has increased tremendously because they now use advancements in technology to improve seeds varieties, soil testing, fertilizers and other innovations.
If history is anything to go by, I say that with AI, we are more likely to create more jobs though there would certainly be job losses in certain sectors because the number of routine repetitive tasks are likely to go and would be taken over by AI and robots. More jobs will be created around design; human centered design. Now people talk about roles like data scientists, user experience designer or cyber security which clearly didn’t exist many years ago. Many jobs will disappear, but many new jobs will also be created. I think the challenge is how one develops skills and competencies to be relevant in the new world but I’m optimistic that in the end, we would create more jobs. Sadly, of recent, most inventions start from the West, where they are likely to gain the benefits before we do and that keeps me up at night. What will the effect of these new technologies be on Africa?
Speaking of technology, how would you explain artificial intelligence to the lay man?
Artificial Intelligence or AI is when human beings design machines ( what some people would call computers) to have in-built intelligence and be able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, which is underpinned by fast access to large storage of previous interactions, records, data and then connecting the dots which help to identify a trend and anticipate responses to varied situations. AI is what makes machines have enough intelligence to look at data, spot trends, connect various dots and be able to provide a response even to a previously unknown situation. While human beings have self-awareness, social, business and emotional intelligence aiding our ability to respond to various known and unknown situations, machines will only do what they have been programmed to do. Now we have taken machines a notch further to give them a sense of ability to respond to unknown situations using historical or similar occurrences and machines are now able to demonstrate visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, translation between languages, predict traffic situations, suggest books to read or video to watch.
How can organisations like JAN prepare our youths in the age of AI?
It is popularly said that knowledge is power. I think the first thing to consider is exposure; let youths know that there is a new phenomenon called AI and what it means and how it is used for good. Because again everything is a doubleedged sword; a knife could be used to spread butter or cut someone. So, I recommend Junior Achievement Nigeria teaches AI. Sow the seed while our youths are in primary or secondary school, sow the seed in their minds, and create the awareness. The second is when we are running our JA Company Programs, we can develop projects or businesses around AI like what we are seeing now in Lagos where quite a few Fintechs and startups are creating interesting and amazing products using new technology concepts. There is nothing stopping us from having our company programme students embracing the use of AI in the development of their products. Verraki is ready to work with JA Nigeria to pilot the integration of basic AI principles into the company programme, to build an army of young Nigeria talents that can begin to leverage AI.
What practical steps should policymakers take to smooth the transition to the age of AI?
First thing is to understand what AI is, and the second thing is to understand the implications and then the third would be to know ‘thyself’. Where are we as a nation in terms of AI? How mature are we in adopting AI? Then define how we can use AI. Once we know how close or how far we are, we can then define a strategy of how to bridge the gap. Develop a strategy of how we want to embrace it, not how we want to hide from it. We also need to make sure that we are inclusive so that we do not create different classes; those who are AI aware and those that are AI blind. We wouldn’t want to create that inequality, so the thing is how do we make every Nigerian to be AI informed or AI aware at the basic level? I believe JA Nigeria can help because given the number of students that we reach, number of volunteers or partners that we have, our ecosystem; if we preach and spread the A.I gospel or technology gospel as it were, we could help people become more knowledgeable.
There has been an uptick in activity within the AI space in Nigeria. How is your organisation using AI?
We’ve been having conversations with clients and with ourselves in terms of where AI can be used. The first thing is to understand what AI is, so we have undertaken training programs to better understand topics like Design Thinking, Machine Learning, Artificial Learning, Robotics Process Automation (RPA). That is the first step; to get everybody to understand the new way and to speak the lingua and then we can now have conversations with clients and ourselves, create internal projects to deploy the use of AI e.g. automate repetitive tasks like reconciliation, customer service, chat sessions; and also then deploy these solutions for clients.
Also, from a skills perspective, the fourth industrial revolution and digital economy we are experiencing will require an army of technologists; whether Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality or Robotics who will build and foster this new world. Nigeria can quickly take advantage of these and develop people that will play a major role in this new world, similar to what China has done. JA Nigeria and other players can work together to skill our youth and position them to be active players and contributors to the emerging technology-driven world.
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