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Women Need Incentives to Go Into ICT -Dr. Hassan

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Dr. (Mrs.) Omowunmi Hassan, currently lead consultant and managing director of HOJOB Consults Ltd – ICT training and Policy Analysis consultancy firm in Nigeria, is also the chief executive and presiding officer of High Tech Centre for Nigerian Women and Youth – an NGO established to empower and build the capacity of women and youths in ICT across Nigeria.
An IT professional per excellence, she has worked at various IT positions in reputable Organizations.
Hassan, with a lot of publications in several journals to her credit, spoke to peter ugwu on issues regarding women and youths in IT-Nigeria.

Setting Up of High Tech Centre
The gap in ICT and the digital divide among the gender changing information and communications technologies (ICT) around the world brings, and the challenges these have brought to developing countries, information and knowledge sharing or dissemination has become a more pressing problem for the women-folk and younger ones in Africa, especially in the West African region.
 Hence, the beginning of our initiative to bridge the digital gap between men and women literacy in ICT taking cue from the Ghanaian High Tech Women in the early 2000.
I was challenged in March 2004 during the International ICT Conference in Ghana on capacity building interventions for women and girls’ involvement in ICT, the Nigerian High Tech Women was therefore born in May 2004 at Ile-Ife, Osun State.

The Set Objectives
The primary vision as at the beginning of our creation was to reach out to women and girls in Nigeria through awareness / literacy campaign, workshops, summits on ICTs and computer usage while providing information on ICT access opportunities in different places like market, hospitals, Local government areas, etc.
The organization however, metamorphosed into High Tech Centre for Nigerian Women and Youths in 2012, after a rigorous status and nomenclature changes necessitated by the feared digital divide between the gender (male and female) which established us and was then seen to be marginalizing the capacity building interventions against the ‘boy child’.
This births the incorporation of ‘youth initiatives’ to accommodate the empowerment of both sexes in ICTs among the younger and upcoming generation through our engagements and activities.
The various categories of women from the academia/professionals, public/civil servants, private sector, business / entrepreneurs, women in rural communities and girls in schools was identified as targets of our intervention, thus the justification for the strategic goals and aspirations of the organization.
With a focused vision and mission statement, the initiative to catch – them young started the outreach of the NGO to schools by establishing ICT Clubs in Schools as well as creating Clubs in Local Government Areas around Ile-Ife town in Osun State of Nigeria then.
The youth incorporation birthed the ICT Summer Academy Camp (ISAC) for Youths (male and females) from ages 15 while the school seminars is for primary and secondary school children was tagged Children ICT Summit (CIT).
Furthermore, we were able to strategically map out how to reach our targets by planning initiatives that address various categories of women and youths. Such includes, workshop for wives and women leaders at the States and Local Government Areas (LGAs) tagged Women Leaders Forum (WLF).
Professionals and women in the public and private sector of the economy are gathered to a special summit tagged “Women ICT Summit” (WITS) yearly; the first edition was held in 2012 and has since been a national event. To support ICT and computing skills development of female students in tertiary institutions, the Ladies ICT Summit (LITS) was initiated to reach out to all ladies in tertiary institutions in the country.
With the global advocacy for innovation and industrial development of national economies and with the identification of ICT, and indeed science and technology as a driver of technological changes, we have deliberately upgraded our children and youth initiatives for all sexes including the ladies summit to a new dimension with emphasis on ‘Innovation’ and ‘development in a knowledge economy’.
 Hence, our projects for the sect are tagged “e-innovate Nigeria – Stop Downloading… Start Uploading” to encourage the younger generation to think inventions, create products, services, indeed become innovative and entrepreneurial for self sustenance, wealth / job creation to be able to build a sustainable Nigerian economy that can meet up with the national goal of Vision 20:2020.

The High Tech Awards
The High Tech Awards for Women and Youths started in 2012 as part of the activities of the Women ICT Summits yearly.
 It has since been an exciting and elating initiative that has created more awareness of ICT and its impacts as well as facilitated the involvement of prominent, entrepreneurs and visionary young Nigerians to our programmes as they partner to foster more impactful engagements with the NGO.
To conform with global initiatives and career development of women and girls in ICTs, the High tech Centre for Nigerian Women and Youths identified with the ITU international Day of Girls in ICT celebrated worldwide in April every year, and has since been hosting the “Girls in ICT” day since 2013 as a day to sensitize the society of the need to build ICT career in women and girls as well as the social inclusion of the women folks in ICT mainstream internationally.

Capturing Women’s Attention to Embrace Certain IT Programmes
Women attention is drawn to quite a lot of things and the truth is that to get women to do things requires a lot of incentives, advocacies, awareness and encouragements.
We need to create funds, time, opportunities / strategies for them to get involved by supporting them to pay for the trainings available in ICTs (you know most trainings nowadays is not free especially where there is no sponsorship from donor organizations), government must be willing to partner with NGOs who are able to reach out to the grassroots to implement any and all of their initiatives for women and girls.
 This for me is a way of getting more women to know, understand and be willing to run with government’s programs.
As a matter of fact, government formulate policies, create programs but leave the projects to NGOs, Private institutions and other interest groups to implement so as to get better results and facilitate partnerships.

Economic Buoyancy as a Major Factor that Must be Tackled to Attract Their Attention
Yes, I agree not just thinking. I do know that most women (married) depend on their husbands support financially; while a lot more (unmarried and single mothers) are struggling or managing their meager resources.
Thus, funds to get ICTs, attend trainings, and have access to the internet are quite challenging. They need support as much as possible.

Strategies Adopted By High Tech so Far In Galvanizing Women Interest in IT
High Tech has over the years evolved from free trainings / seminars for women to getting States and Local Government Areas support through sponsorship of women to our programs and now, some Agencies of the Government like National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has been supportive in the areas of funding some of our projects for youths and girls but a lot is still needed to do more.
We charge fees (just a token) most times to be able to break even and get knowledge transfer to our target. You know we are not for profits organization. We need nation and international organizations to support these initiatives.

Women’s Interests in ComTech Ministry’s Roadmap for IT Development
The minister is trying so much with the roadmaps in place but the strategic need of the country is to have a well articulated ICT Policy with actionable frameworks, concise key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring procedures and a full back-up legislation and Acts for effective implementation.
This is imperative for her efforts for the industry to be measurable and more impactful. As regards women and girls in ICT initiatives, I think they are trying but the Ministry cannot do it alone.
They are facilitators, provider of enabling environment and motivator, so they should partner with more women NGOs with different capacities and capabilities to create more initiatives and achieve their already set goals so as to get things done at all levels. 
The ministry should set the right directions through policies guidelines and facilitate networking for result based implementation of their policy strategies and programmes.

Cost of the Centre’s Programme to Educate and Equip a Person in IT
In terms of cost, it is relative based on various projects. The children’s e-Innovate events is free for pupils and students from primary / secondary schools but with the introduction of school ICT competitions, schools are required to pay a token of N15,000 (fifteen thousand naira) to participate.
The Youth Summits and Camp is on the average of N 25,000 (twenty five thousand naira), Women ICT Summit is about N50,000 (fifty thousand naira) on the average yearly because of the target group, (we actually save cost to support our children’s project yearly) and the international exchange programme costs is dependent on country to be visited.
We plead for financial support for any or all of these initiatives to enable more women and youths to benefit across States, Local governments, communities and indeed the entire country.

Girls in Decision Making Positions In IT Field
Sure, more than optimistic because we are getting there gradually, women, ladies and girls at all levels are able and we CAN!


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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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