‘How digital mobile technology will impact Africa’s economy’

THE growth and sustainability of economies in the African region have been hinged on the proper use of Information technology (IT).

This was the view of the Chief Executive Officer of Diamond Bank, Uzoma Dozie, who stressed that the massive deployment and proper use of IT, especially in this digital age, will be a major panacea to the sluggish development on the continent.

According to him, the Internet, a major backbone of IT, has shrunken the world to a global business village, thereby altering the way businesses are transacted across continents; pointing that for African countries to catch up with the rest of the world, there is an urgent need to incorporate and optimize mobile technology in the respective countries daily economic activities.

Dozie, who made this assertion at the Lagos Business School (LBS) Roundtable on “Leading by Empowering: Youth, Skills Training and Unemployment in a Changing Economy”, last week in Lagos, added that promoting regular and increased IT skills acquisition would not only act as an accelerant to sustainable industrial growth and development but will also ensure that there is sufficient supply of competent hands to match employers’ demands and eventually slope the unemployment curve.

Drawing from his experience in online banking, Dozie stated that Nigeria’s financial services sub-sector has deployed and grown mobile technology to a level that most developed economies are yet to attain.

“Nigeria has one of the best payment systems in the world and this is enabled by our internet system which is one of the best in Africa. Over time, bank transactions have become easier compared to what they used to be in the time past and this is basically the result of improved Internet banking in Nigeria. The implication of this growing trend is the increasing need for employable hands with requisite skills”.

He noted that there has been a paradigm shift that has made the acquisition of IT skills an imperative for business growth in Nigeria. According to him, the biggest problem for businesses in Nigeria is not capital, as there are many organizations out there with available funds for businesses, but lack of information on how to access these funds remains a big challenge.

“The knowledge of technology and how it works has become imperative for businesses to grow in Nigeria. However there is an erroneous assumption that lack of capital is the biggest problem that businesses, especially startup entrepreneurs face, whereas our findings show that lack of information and how to access this information which are in abundance on the internet is the real challenge. There are many organizations out there willing to give funds to startups but they have little or no knowledge of how and where to access those funds”.

One of the key messages that stood out during the CEO Roundtable was the need to emphasize skills acquisition in different sectors of the economy and de-emphasize paper qualifications that have little or no bearing on employability.

Reacting to this call for a shift from paper qualification to relevant and up-to-date employable skills, Diamond Bank CEO stated that one of the major recurring decimal, is the high number of educated but unskilled persons seeking for employment, and needs a lot of retraining to be useful in an organization.