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Nigeria is Ripe for ICT Valley-Olufade

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Toyin Olufade is president, Association of Nigeria Courier Operators (Anco). He is also the managing director and chief executive officer of Swift Couriers Limited and has been in the courier industry for over 25 years.
Olufade worked for DHL for 12 years and before establishing Swift Couriers in 1997. In this interview with nkechi david-iwuchukwu, he spoke on industry issues and how to move the association forward.

Growth in the Courier Industry
The industry is relatively new in Nigeria, when I say new it is not an old industry, courier industry even in the world, is not as old as post, courier is door-to-door, hand-to-hand delivery of packages and documents. In Nigeria here, a child is still young at 25 and is still a young baby at 30 and that is basically how old the industry has been. The industry started in 1979 and I joined in 1984, so it is relatively very young in this country, if you do the mathematics from 1979 to 2010 is about 31 years old. However, the industry has grown from may be two to three players over time to about 240 players right now. The industry is still evolving because even at 240, it is still a very low number, to what a growing economy should have. What I mean by that is that you find out that a lot of courier companies are concentrated in Lagos, with a few in other parts of the country. In fact what I am saying is that we are limited, in that we could have a courier company concentrating just in deliveries of document in Enugu and effective in Enugu township, not to talk of Enugu state. So, if we are to expand this business, as the economy is expanding, we should have over 1,000 courier companies in Nigeria right now. So the growth of the industry is determined by the state of the economy and the response of consumers to post. Right now, we are still selling and sensitizing our people on the need, for instance, when you talk about mail shots, couriers are still not playing in that field, even the post is not playing. Our people are not playing in that field yet, but that is where you generate a lot of document, for instance, lets say Shoprite has coupons to give out to customers, they do mail shots and the courier drops it at their customers houses, for example 10 per cent discount on coca cola today and the customers picks the coupons and goes back to the shop to redeem it, but those things are not there, we are not doing that. The industry, is so wide that we are still limited by what we do right now, but we are hoping that as we grow and as the economy itself grows, the industry will continue to expand and there will be so much to do for each player.

Challenges Faced
The challenges are still enormous. The start-up cost is there and you know that Nigeria is still cash based, to do anything you need to put cash down upfront, you want to buy a car, you want to buy a truck, you pay full. That means you need a lot of money upfront in your pocket to start-up, but it shouldn’t be that because a business is supposed to start-up with just the working capital to run the equipments that you have. We also have the problem of electricity and road. The roads are bad. The problem of personnel is also there, because they are not adequately educated, so you spend a lot of time training and re-training. The challenge of taxes is there too and that is killing. When I say taxes we have various levels of taxes, which amount to double taxation. For example, if there is a withholding tax, to get your document, even from the people you work for, is a challenge, it’s either they are not paying the withholding tax or you can not file for  your tax purposes. Even in the local government where you operate your business, instead of being happy that at least your presence in the area will create employment, they visit you in the first month of operation demanding for one levy or the other. We are still having discussion with the local governments as a body, to explain to them that they need to welcome our people in their various areas and when they see Anco stickers, it should serve as a licence to move ahead, because we carry very urgent, time sensitive, and critical document that may have to do with live, business progress and promotion but we are surprise that the local government officials sit on Anco bikes and cause delays that may even indirectly affect them. Because they are not aware that we are of a critical nature to the development of the economy and information if not passed at the right time could cause serious problems. I am using this opportunity to let the local government know that we are in a critical sector, information dissemination which is required in the business economy, helps the economy to grow. For instance, if a major manufacturer has a slight problem and I have that little bolt or nut for the machine to be put back to work, the industry can be grounded for weeks if that bolt or nut does not get to them as at when due. So the longer you delay in getting the item to the industry, the longer people will stay out of work, so that means it will affect the economy. So since we operate in a sensitive sector, we want every player including the police to ensure that they correct that.

Banks Interest in Courier
We have seen of late that there is more to it than meets the eye, but of course it’s a free market we are operating and every body can get into any business. The truth of the matter is this, I think we should specialize in our area of competence, so I expect the banks to focus on their core competence and provide money to companies that are specialist in this field. By setting up a business and being a competitor to your customer does not speak well. I think the regulatory body of the banks should look into it, because there are limitation to the volume of document you can handle yourself, so if bank xyz opens a courier company and thinks it can move more than a percentage of their item then they are kidding, they need to look at it other wise they are doing something wrong. I would rather suggest that the banks should help grow businesses because you cannot make blocks and at the same time build the house yourself.

Skilled Manpower in the Sector
Skilled manpower is an area that needs a serious attention, unfortunate for us right now there is no courier school, no university where one can study courier, but of course we have courses in logistics which is not enough, so right now Anco is working on becoming chartered in the near future, where people will begin to be taught on how to handle courier and what courier is all about. Courier is a profession that needs to be properly attended to, so that we can effectively discharge the duties that we need to do. Anco is already looking at it, we are planning to set up a training school, to train and also have a recruitment centre for various departments, from courier to clericals, customer service, marketers, and things like that, that is in the focus and it is in the pipe line. I am hoping that in the next one year, things will materialize and in our movement with government, the ministry of education and others, we will be able to become certified as soon as possible. Right now, individually we are trying to train and re-train our people in new developments in the courier industry and it takes a longer time but if we have a body that can train them like ICAN, you go to school to study accountancy but you also take a professional course to become a chartered accountant or a chartered   marketer for instance, so that is the area we are looking at now, so that we can become more professional than we currently are.

The Regulatory Body  
Courier Regulatory Department (CRD) of the Nipost is our regulatory body, within their scope they have been able to do well and within the limit of their operating guidelines they have been able to do the best they can. Of course you will notice of late that we have been saying that a player too cannot be a regulator, it is not right and there is some level of injustice there but that is what we have now. But there is still cry that there should be a body, an independent and autonomous body, like a commission that will regulate all of us including post, as long as you deal with mails. We believe that it will come on stage quickly, because we are so desirous of it. There can be transformation, CRD could transform to become the commission but I am not in the position to say that but we are hoping that we can have an independent commission, so that there can be more effectiveness as   it happened in the telecommunication industry. The development that has taken place in the telecommunication Industry in the last few years is enormous and I believe that same thing can happen in the postal sector but you will notice that it could not happen until there was a separate regulatory body known as the National Communication Commission, so if we have a National Postal Commission, you will imagine the wonders that will happen.

Future of ICT Development in Nigeria  
That is the way it is, ICT development not just in Nigeria but in the world, I was in India last year and ICT is breaking them open to the world. As a matter of fact most of the companies have their customer service based in India, so after office hours and you want to talk to someone, someone is talking to you from India. Nigeria also has the potential, because I can run a customer service from my one room, since I have all the equipments, I have the computer and I have the information that is the benefit of ICT. India purposed to develop that sector and today they are a super power in it, they call it ‘silicon valley’ and I think Nigeria is ripe for its own.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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