International Data Corporation (IDC) hosted the sixth annual edition of its West Africa CIO Summit in Lagos, Nigeria.

Running under the theme ‘Enabling a Blueprint for Thriving in the Digital Economy’, the Summit attracted more than 100 of the region’s most prominent ICT leaders and showcased innovative strategies for embracing the disruptive power of digital transformation.

Targeted exclusively at C-level executives and above, the event combined thought-provoking presentations with interactive workshops, panel discussions, and case studies, all while facilitating one-to-one meetings between the providers of cutting-edge technology solutions and the influential decision makers responsible for driving their implementation.

“As the digital revolution continues to gather pace, traditional business models are undergoing unprecedented levels of disruption,” said Mark Walker, associate vice president for Sub-Saharan Africa, as he opened the day’s proceedings. “This has triggered a wave of digital transformation across the region, and we are delighted to be here in Lagos today to provide West Africa’s ICT leaders with the expert guidance required to navigate the numerous challenges and roadblocks that lie in wait.”

The Summit’s agenda had been tailored to help CIOs rethink the way they leverage information, implement emerging ICT solutions, and facilitate organisation-wide innovation, with the ultimate aim of making their enterprises more agile, efficient, and productive than ever before. The rise of disruptive automation featured prominently, while in-depth insights were provided into a broad range of pressing issues such as driving digital business at scale, harnessing the power of enterprise mobility, building a resilient cybersecurity strategy, and empowering innovation with cloud.

Delivering the Summit’s keynote address, IDC’s group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa, Jyoti Lalchandani, offered compelling advice on breaking through the digital deadlock and identifying inherent organisational weaknesses.

“By 2018, 75% of CIOs will put experiential engagement, data monetisation, or digital business at scale at the top of their agenda,” he said. “However, some 59% of organisations are at a digital impasse today, either running ad hoc digital transformation initiatives or — if they have gained traction in their efforts — the changes are not universally applied across the enterprise. Various factors are holding these companies back, including ineffective organizational models, underdeveloped digital capabilities, outdated KPIs, overly tactical digital roadmaps, and the sheer absence of an enterprise digital platform.”

As well as the numerous ICT industry experts speaking at the event, a number of respected end-user thought leaders were on hand to provide invaluable demand-side perspectives on the latest technology trends that are transforming the region’s organizations. These included the likes of Uchechi Edosomwan, head of IT services at the Nigeria Airtime Management Agency; Esomchi Nwafor, chief technology officer at Custodian & Allied Insurance; Oladimeji Kazeem, general manager of ICT at Pal Pensions; and Samuel Menyah Asah-Kissiedu, head of IT at Millennium Insurance.

IDC’s valued partners for the West Africa CIO Summit 2018 included CSEAN as Affiliate Partner; FABS, VMware, and Schneider Electric as Platinum Partners; Veeam and Fortinet as Gold Partners; and BlueSPACE Africa as Exhibit Partner.

The world’s leading minds in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and humanitarian action are convening from today for the three-day 2 ^nd AI for Good Global Summit . The summit will generate AI strategies and supporting projects to accelerate progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals . It will connect AI innovators with public and private-sector decision-makers, building collaboration to take promising strategies forward.

The AI for Good series is the leading United Nations platform for dialogue on AI. The 2 ^nd AI for Good Global Summit is taking place at the global headquarters of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technology (ICT). It is being organized by ITU in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation , the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and 32 sister United Nations agencies.

“The inaugural 2017 summit sparked inclusive global dialogue on the potential of AI to act as a force for good,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “The action-oriented 2018 summit will now harness this momentum to identify practical applications of AI to improve the quality and sustainability of life on our planet.”

The summit’s participants will rally around near-term AI solutions capable of yielding benefits of long-term relevance to sustainable development.

The first day of the summit will set the scene for the work ahead. Experts will explore the many dimensions of AI’s growing influence on our societies and economies. They will share insight into the state of play in AI technologies and applications, forecasting AI advances and associated transformations appearing on the horizon.

“Over the years, XPRIZE competitions have inspired innovation to address some of the grand challenges identified by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and as a result we have foreseen the need to spark a bigger conversation centered around use of exponential technologies such as AI,” said Anousheh Ansari, Member & Chair of Management of XPRIZE Foundation Board of Directors. “That’s why XPRIZE became a partner in AI for Good as we believe the ability to create safe, beneficial and ethical AI solutions can greatly improve life on our planet for all and lead us to a better future, and we look forward to supporting the collaborative efforts that will come out of this Summit.”

“AI technologies have enormous potential to effect positive change in nearly every facet of life,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “While many AI gatherings are valuable forums where important ideas are presented and discussed, AI for Good emphasizes teams working together to develop actionable steps in which AI is employed to aid society. In this way, the summit presents a valuable model of how societies will need to address AI challenges and opportunities in the future.”

The heart of the summit – spanning the length of the second day – will see ‘breakthrough teams’ demonstrating AI’s value to humanitarian action and sustainable development.

These teams will highlight AI’s potential to advance healthcare, support citizen-centric services in smart cities, and map poverty using satellite imagery. They will investigate means to meet the data demands of AI algorithms and build trust and transparency in the application of artificial intelligence. Their ultimate goal is to propose AI strategies and supporting projects that could be enacted in the near term for the benefit of humanity.

Teams will be guided in this endeavour by an expert audience representing government, industry, academia and civil society.

The matchmaking exercise will introduce problem owners to solution owners. On the third day of the summit, participants will evaluate proposed strategies according to their feasibility and scalability and potential to address truly global challenges.

The 2018 summit is kindly supported by Gold Sponsors: ACM, the Kay Family Foundation, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and PWC; and Silver Sponsors: Ernst & Young and the Zero Abuse Project.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released Consumer Price Index (CPI) data yesterday and in line with Afrinvest and Consensus expectation, Headline inflation moderated to 12.5%.

This marks the 15^th consecutive decline in Headline inflation since it peaked at 18.7% in January 2017. As  seen in recent months, the ongoing disinflation trend – which began in Q1:2017 – remains largely driven by base effect as Month on Month (M-o-M) CPI growth was barely changed at 0.83% in April relative to 0.84% in March.

Base Effect Drives Inflation Sub-Indices to Multi-Year Lows
The base effect played out in reported Y-o-Y Inflation of both CPI Sub-Indices. Core Index growth (all items less volatile food items) measured Y-o-Y declined from 11.2% in March to a 27-month low of 10.9% in April – the lowest level since the Feb-2016 hike in electricity tariff which resulted in the first double-digit Core Inflation in nearly 3 years.

This came despite a marginal 3bps uptick in M-o-M growth to 0.87%, which suggests base effect remains the major driver. Similarly, Y-o-Y Food inflation fell from 16.1% in March to a 2-year low of 14.8% in the reported month despite a marginal 1bp increase in the Index’s M-o-M growth to 0.91%. Yet, we note that beyond the well-emphasized base-effect tailwind driving Food inflation moderation, food prices on a M-o-M basis have been remarkably stable in a typically volatile off-season period.

This perhaps reflects the success of several CBN and FGN financing initiatives targeted at smallholder farmers which resulted in above-trend Crop Production growth in Q4:2017.

Favourable Inflation Development Presents CBN with an Opportunity to begin to Converge MPR with Market Rates
With the high base effect still in play, at least until July 2018, we expect the disinflation trend to continue in the near term. Yet, based on all near term scenarios we considered, we are convinced year-end Headline Inflation (projected at 10.2%) will be short of the CBN’s soft target of 7 – 9% as we expect CPI base to normalize in Q3:2018.

However we think the positive development in consumer prices within the last 14 months, resulting in a positive real interest rate (see chart 3), has presented the CBN with an opportunity to begin to converge Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) with market interest rates which have since priced-in inflation expectation.

Expectation

Thus, we expect the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to strongly consider an MPR cut in its next meeting taking place next week (May 21st and 22nd, 2018), although the decision would likely be delayed due to the ongoing capital flow reversal and asset prices volatility in emerging and frontier markets.

The current capital flow reversal has been the strongest test for liquidity in the Investors’ and Exporters’ Window (I&E Window) so far; a test it is yet to pass with flying colors.

Regardless, as we have argued in previous notes, an MPR cut (either at next week’s sitting or subsequent ones) will have little impact on fixed income yields as the CBN has already set in motion the easing cycle by deliberately guiding market rates downwards in the past 9 months, in addition to knock-on effects of the FGN fiscal strategy to reduce domestic debt issuance.

Dr. Ikechukwu Adinde
Administrator
Digital Bridge Institute

Dr. Ikechukwu Adinde, Administrator of the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI), Nigeria’s foremost ICT capacity building institute, has canvassed more investment by governments at all levels in the development of ICT knowledge and skill. The Institute is an arm of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

This, he said, is the only way the country will maximize its investments in ICT infrastructure. He disclosed this during a brief engagement with journalists in Abuja at the weekend. According to Adinde, without concomitant investment in skills and training, the nation cannot optimally harness the possibilities and potential inherent in the deployment of infrastructure across the country.

He said emphasis has been on funding of ICT hardware procurement, stressing that the time has come for a paradigm shift in which ICT funding should be spread across hardware, software and skills acquisition (training).

“There are two ways to funding ICT: infrastructure side and soft side (skills and knowledge). On the hard side which is the infrastructure side, it is easy to perceive the investment that is being made and often times that’s what the government talks about (buying computers, equipment, installing gadgets etc.), but the most important part is the skills and the knowledge that people need to harness the potential in those hardware investments.

“We had made a case sometime in 2016 at the capacity building symposium organised by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) that the investments in USPF (universal service provision fund) across Africa instead of being channelled wholly and exclusively to ICT infrastructure should be dedicated to ICT skills development, in that if someone is investing $10million in ICT infrastructure, 10 per cent of the money should go for ICT skills development especially targeted at the youths now commonly called the millennials.

“They are the ones who will use the infrastructure to innovate, create and develop the things that will make the future happen, but as long as we don’t make that investment then it means that you’ll put a piece of ICT equipment in an office and nobody is using it because the skills are not there”, he said.

He explained it using a telephone. “A typical phone, for example, can do a lot for us but because the knowledge of the use of the phone is not available, meanwhile we’ve invested a lot of money buying this device, we limit ourselves to just making calls and sending text messages”.

According to him, there’s a critical need to invest in building ICT capacity for the young people and that’s why “DBI continues to innovate programmes that target the young people so that we fulfil our mandate in that area”.

He explained that their training focuses on both young persons and those who are advanced in age but wish to upscale their ICT skills. “We have young people who have just finished from secondary school and are looking to pursue a career in ICT. They join our National Innovation Diploma programme, which is a two-year programme (Telecommunications Technology, Multimedia Technology, Networking and Systems Security and Computer Hardware and Software Engineering), after which they can move on or if they want to continue at a higher level they can pursue a degree in higher institutions”.

On the NID programme, he said: “We have people with degrees who come into the programme because the course is practical based, where the students are mostly in the lab. We have computer science graduates who are currently taking this programme (in Lagos and in Kano). The reason they’re in the programme is because they want to get hands-on experience from our labs and workshops. We also have professors, PhD holders and those in the public sectors with us; our programmes attract participants from across a wide range of the market.”