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SAP Leading Technological Revolution among Young Students in W/Africa – Ajayi

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Olajide Ajayi is the director FIRST LEGO LEAGUE (FLL) Nigeria. He is also a Software Engineer/Technical Quality Manager with SAP in Ireland.
SAP is the number one Enterprise Software Application provider in the world. Ajayi is currently coordinating the FIRST® LEGO® League Nigeria with the support of SAP and NITDA.
In this interview with Peter Ugwu, he spoke on their plans to develop next generation of scientists, technologies, engineers and mathematicians in Nigeria via FLL. 

First LEGO League
This program is an alliance between LEGO®, the educational giant and FIRST, an organization in the USA. FIRST® was founded by Dean Kamen, an American and inventor, who made Segway, a motorized cycle. He has lots of patent in the US and just thought to himself, ‘I can create things why don’t I teach people how to create things’.
So he founded the organization called FIRST and then partnered with LEGO to form the FIRST LEGO League. FIRST® LEGO® League is an Educational partnership between FIRST® and the LEGO® Group. It is a program for a team (comprising of 2-10) of children from ages 9 to 16 with a different challenge/theme issued annually. It has three (3) components comprising of Project, Robot Game and Core Values.
In the project, teams research a real-life issue related to the theme of the year, create or proffer a new and innovative solution, then present this information (using different presentation models and props) during a timed presentation to the judges.
This is followed up by a timed question and answer period. The robot game deals with robot design, build and programming to complete a set of missions on a thematic table-top playing surface. Core Values – the FLL Core Values are the cornerstones of the FLL program.
They are among the fundamental elements that distinguish FLL from other programs of its kind. By embracing the Core Values, participants learn that friendly competition and mutual gain are not separate goals, and that helping one another is the foundation of teamwork.
The values are: We are a team; we do the work to find solutions with guidance from our coaches and mentors; we know our coaches and mentors don’t have all the answers; we learn together; we honour the spirit of friendly competition; what we discover is more important than what we win; we share our experiences with others; we display Gracious Professionalism® and Coopertition® in everything we do and we have FUN!
The program offers immense benefits to participating schools and students. It provides schools with a great opportunity to introduce technology into the curriculum to help sharpen students’ digital numeracy skills and also for teachers to get some good training in modern teaching and mentoring techniques.
Some benefits for students are highlighted by using the yearly Challenges, FLL: Entices kids to think like scientits and engineers; provides a fun, creative, hands-on learning experience; teaches kids to experiment and overcome obstacles;  builds self-esteem and confidence; inspires kids to participate in science and technology;  kids develop life skills such as communication, project, resources and time management and it also offers students unlimited opportunities to test their wits against those of their peers around the world and prepares them to compete favourably in the future within the global knowledge economy.

Partnership with SAP and NITDA
SAP supported us with equipment for Lagos and NITDA(National Information Technology Development Agency)  responsible for Abuja.
As I said the program currently being supported by SAP and NITDA is open to more sponsors as number of teams grows year on year and more regions are added to existing ones.
SAP is channelling the future of kids age 9-16 by sponsoring the FIRST® LEGO® League in West Africa. The software giant have taken a leap of faith to support this program and the rewards are starting to show. Recently, at the University of Lagos Nigeria a group of young students called SAP Smart Teens from Onilekere Junior Secondary School Ikeja, a suburb of Lagos Nigeria came out victorious at the inaugural FLL program.
The event had over 300 students, mentors and members of the public in attendance. It was covered by most media houses including AIT, Daily Times, Daily Trust, Nigerian Communication Week etc. The program was hosted by the University of Lagos.
The FLL program is an annual event where kids demographic 9-16 are tasked with the responsibility of finding solution to real-life problems. It also embodies the Core Values of the FLL of Gracious Professionalism and Coopetition.
The most exciting for kids at the University of Lagos event was the Robot Game where the competitors have to carry out several missions on thematic tables using autonomous robots.

Target Demographic Under FIRST LEGO LEAGUE Initiative
The target age is 9 years to 16 years because it is an age bracket we feel will have the mental capability to learn the programming and the rigorous task that we want to put them through.

Possible Extension to Tertiary Institutions
FIRST®  as an organization have other programs, one is the Junior FLL, which is targeted at the primary kids, then FLL which is targeted to nine to 16 years,  then FTC which is First Tech Challenge targeted at the university. So we will be bringing that as well.

Place of Government in Pushing FLL
We have nothing from the Federal Government yet. We are a Non-Governmental /Not for Profit Organisation (NGO) and we have been running on a shoe string budget and been working with people on a shoe string budget.
You know that volunteering culture is not very popular in Nigeria, so everybody we have to work with we have to pay and most of these payments have been coming from personal pockets. We are so short on resources it is unreal, but we just decided that we will carry this through.
We will need other organizations within the public and private sector to support this initiative. e.g. Intel, Google, Telcos like MTN, Airtel, Globacom, Etisalat and other organizations that have the interest of kids at heart.

First LEGO League Competition in Nigeria
This is the inaugural FIRST LEGO LEAGUE competition in Nigeria and it is an annual event. So we give the kids the challenge about August and they work till September through November, December. They work for eight weeks and then we will organize a championship for them.
This year we started late because the resources didn’t come in until much later in the year. So we started in November however schools vacation in December delayed things a bit further. That is why we are doing this at this time.
Next year we will be doing the next one in November/December, so we can get the winners of the Regional championships in Lagos, Abuja,  Port Harcourt and Enugu (Which we plan on including this year) to compete at a National championship.
We want to expand along the geopolitical zones. So we started in Abuja which is the North Central and Lagos which is the South West. 
We hope to do the South-South and South-East this year so that we can have the National Championship in January. We have the Regional in December and National championship in January.

Selection of Schools
In Lagos we are working with public schools. We approached the Education District and we asked for 10 schools for the pilot phase, but they gave us 20 schools so we merged the 20 schools to 12 teams. Each team comprises of 2-10 students.

Assessment of ICT industry In Nigeria?
ICT in Nigeria is growing. It takes a visionary leader to turn things around and the Minister in charge is doing a lot I think some collaboration between the Ministries of Education and Communication Tech would help strengthen TechEd(Technology Education). Some of the schools we work with lack resources and the teachers lack basic ICT skills.
 So one of the things we hope to achieve with this program is to teach the teachers so that we can build an ecosystem of trained ICT teachers who are able to impart STEM Skills to their students.

Fate of Participating Students and Schools after the Competition
Each school will work in their own school and the ones we joined together have been working cooperatively.
The program does not end after the season as the schools will continue working on honing their programming skills in readiness for the next season.

Government and Funding of Nigeria’s Knowledge Economy
The Federal Government is interested in capacity building for youth within the knowledge economy; thankfully we have a Minister of Communication Technology who is a technocrat and knows that technology should be placed at the core of our development.
We only need people to come up with initiatives such as this and I am certain that she would embrace them. We can’t expect the government to do everything so we need the third sector, public private to come in to fill these gaps.

Hope of Localizing FLL Tools for Local Content Development
What we do is that LEGO gives us a challenge every year and the challenge for this year is going to be “how do you manage your waste”.
Waste is generated everywhere across the world, so the kids in England will work on how to manage their waste looking at their environment.
The kids in Nigeria will look at the Nigerian environment and see how to manage their waste. It is localized and it funnels down to the local environment.
The kids in England will teach us how they want to learn. And the kids in Nigeria will teach us how they want to learn. It is an application and you apply it to your environment. It is a gestation that will determine the idea you are to throw forward.

Is Robotic Technology Not a New Concept In Nigeria?
It is a new concept in Nigeria and CODERINA is one of the pioneers to bring it to Nigeria. I must say the CODERINA team who are the regional operational partner of FLL have performed really well in such a short time. They only saw this program through my eyes and they hit the ground running and have been able to put together two regional championships in the first year.
Robotics is good for kids because it teaches them how to build, how to create things and changes the mindset that we don’t really have to make much because other people will make them anyway. This is a game changer and it will teach the kids that they can actually create something. Because we gave the students these robots in parts and they built the robots with the software we gave them. You have seen the results of their hard-work today.

First LEGO Legague in the Next Two To Five Years
In the next two to five years we want FIRST LEGO League to be running across the Federation and we can grow horizontally within the states and we can eventually have central points where kids can come and partake and learn about technology and its application for FREE. We want to take this program to the rural areas, and everywhere we can take it to because this is the future of education.

How Do You Recruit Teams For The Program
The FLL program is open to teams of 2-10kids (having two adult mentors) from public and private schools, after-school groups, churches or mosques group of kids.
The next recruitment session for teams starts in April through May and spaces are limited. Registration of teams is done by registering an interest on the organisers website www.fllnigeria.org or by requesting a demo through the outreach contact at [email protected].


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EAIF Commits Additional US$30M to Support Indorama’s Expansion with Third Urea Plant in Nigeria

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The Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), a Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) company, has committed a US$30 million senior debt facility to Indorama, a leading producer and exporter of fertiliser.

The investment enables the construction of a new plant, port terminal, handling stations, and storage facilities in Nigeria, providing a major boost for the country’s agricultural sector, which is a crucial driver of the country and region’s economic growth.

EAIF acted as a co-lender within a broader debt financing package arranged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), mobilising US$1.25 billion from a syndicate of impact investors, development finance solutions, and commercial banks.

EAIF’s investment increases the Fund’s lending to the company to $111 million, reflecting a joint-ambition to accelerate Indorama’s growth strategy and Nigeria’s aspirations for diversification and industrialisation.

The new funding unlocks fresh capital to enable the construction of a dedicated port terminal and state-of-the-art urea fertiliser plant, anticipating an increase in its current capacity from 2.8 million metric tons to 4.2 million metric tons per annum.

The expansion leverages the company’s strategic location as a freight-competitive supplier serving the needs of significant urea markets in the southern Atlantic, including Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as West Africa, South Africa and the USA.

The facility bolsters Indorama’s capacity, extending its complex beyond the current two urea fertiliser plants, which is well poised to meet the entire demand of the Nigerian market.

The third urea plant aims to maximise output to meet the food demands of growing populations as disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis affect food security around the globe.

Global crop production is reliant on the international supply of fertiliser. The landmark project is expected to position Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, as a leading producer of urea among the top 10 producers worldwide.

Contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 9 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, EAIF’s loan forms part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) objective for new infrastructure to drive action on climate and nature.

The construction of the port terminal and third plant is set to begin in 2024, with commercial operations expected to commence in 2026. During the construction phase, it is estimated that over 500 jobs will be generated, further contributing to economic development in Nigeria and beyond.

Commenting on the transaction, Olivia Carballo, Managing Director, Emerging Market, Fixed Income at Ninety One, the fund manager of the EAIF, said: “Our continued support for Indorama demonstrates EAIF’s commitment to harnessing the region’s significant economic prospects.

Africa’s potential for industrialisation is tremendous, and this landmark project is a testament to Nigeria’s enhanced ability to produce and export competitively priced, high-quality fertiliser to farmers in regional and international markets, which will remain a priority for years to come.”

Munish Jindal, CEO, Indorama, said: “Indorama will utilise state-of-the-art technology and adhere to stringent environmental standards to ensure optimal efficiency, product quality and sustainability.

We believe that the establishment of this fertiliser will position Nigeria as a key player in the global agricultural market. We are committed to maximising the potential of this project to benefit farmers, communities, and stakeholders across the value chain.

The involvement of esteemed lenders like the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund will not only help Nigeria’s in becoming one of the largest exporter of the fertilisers in the region but will also address the issues of global food security. We extend our sincere appreciation to all our partners, lenders, and stakeholders for their unwavering support and dedication to our shared vision.”

Sérgio Pimenta, IFC Vice President for Africa, said: “Reliable access to high quality fertiliser is essential for food production and food security around the world. IFC’s investment in Indorama, along with African, Asian, European, and American partners, signals our joint commitment to support the agriculture sector, Nigeria’s economy, and the expansion of Indorama, an important supplier in the global food chain.”


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Lifi.net Achieves 500mbps Speed to Rank among Fastest Internet Providers in Nigeria

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Lifi.net, a fast-growing internet service provider, has attained internet speed that is many times faster than the documented average internet speed in Nigeria as at January 2024.

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Latest disclosure by LIfi.net shows that the company now delivers up to 500 megabits per seconds (mbps) internet speed in unlimited services provided to homes and offices. This is higher than the country’s average internet speed of 26.74mbps.

As internet subscriber base increases in Nigeria and hit 161.68 million in January, the quality of internet service provided by operators to their users still constitutes concerns as 2G network which has limited speed dominates the space by covering 57.78%.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed through its latest data that while 3G is responsible for 9.36% of internet users in the country, 4G covers 31.75% of internet access and 5G internet only serves 1.11% of internet users in the country.

This combination explains why Nigeria ranked 93rd on the global mobile internet speed test out of 144 countries tested by Ookla, a U.S-based internet speed analysis firm, in January, putting the country’s median internet speed at 26.74 megabits per second (mbps).

However, Lifi.net (NT/007/22), a licensee of NCC, is among few Internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver fastest internet speed in Nigeria with up 350mbps for homes and 2500mbps for offices while assisting new ISPs with speeds over 5000mbps at the data centre and delivering the capacity to their various hubs at no extra cost.

“For over five years Lifi.net has been a leading network company, providing quality internet solutions at the speed of light and at affordable rates. We have highly technical and hard-working personnel and partners. We are very skilled at managing Cisco and Mikrotik Routers’ deployment, configurations, and integrations, fibre laying, and splicing,” says Abraham Oluwambe, Chief Operating Officer of Lifi.net.

He added that as operators attract more subscribers to their respective networks, they should equally place a premium on upgrading the quality of services to deliver broadband at the fastest internet speed possible.

“Our services are not only widespread but also affordable. We believe in making quality connectivity accessible to all. We understand the importance of budget-friendly solutions. Our cost-effective broadband plans ensure you get the best value for your investment without compromising on quality.

“While providing high-speed and reliable broadband connectivity, operators may choose the floor or the peak performance of its service. At Lifi.net, we always go for the latter,” he said.


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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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