The Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta, has emphasized the important role played by women in the country’s socio-economic and political space while underscoring the need to empower them in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as an enabler for social change.

Danbatta stated this while delivering a goodwill message at a webinar organised by Zinari Communications Limited with the theme: “Mainstreaming Rural Women Enterprise Development into Digital Economy Initiative: The Opportunities, Strategies and Constraints,” which held on Tuesday, February 16, 2021.

According to Danbatta, who was represented by the Head, Online Media and Special Publication, NCC, Grace Ojougboh, there is no doubt that women have been historically central to socio-economic and political development of any nation and stressed the need  for nations to focus more on how ICT can be leveraged for increased empowerment for women.

He said: “There has been a general concern that unless the gender divide between men and women is specifically addressed, there is a risk that ICT may worsen existing inequalities between women and men which could create new forms of inequality.

“However, if the gender dimensions of ICT in terms of access and use, capacity-building opportunities, employment and potential for empowerment are explicitly identified and addressed, ICT can be a powerful catalyst for political, economic and social empowerment of women, and the promotion of gender equality.”

He advocated increased collaboration between public and private-sector stakeholders toward advancing gender equality and women empowerment, notably by encouraging young women and girls to pursue studies and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The EVC said the Commission will continue to play a front-seat role in driving the implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy document (NDEPS), 2020-2030; the Nigeria National Broadband Plan (NNBP), 2020-2025 and similar policies aimed at increased connectivity to all the citizens to bridge gender digital disparity.

Danbatta said the Commission constantly provides the necessary infrastructure that will guarantee ubiquitous access to telecoms services through the implementation of these policies while listing other initiatives undertaken by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), all aimed at boosting connectivity and provision of ICT tools among citizens, regardless of gender, across the length and breadth of Nigeria. He listed the initiatives to include the Community Resource centers (CRS), School Knowledge Centers (SKC), E-accessibility projects, among others.

“There is no doubt that these efforts will facilitate development of a vibrant digital ecosystem where rural women can play very important roles in our socio-economic and political space,” he added.

Norak Technologies Limited, an indigenous information technology (IT) located in Lagos has partnered with the African Development Bank (AfDB)to bring world-class learning solutions to Nigerians known as “ACADASUITE.”  ACADASUITE has been described as innovative solution designed to bridge the gap in qualitative education at little or no cost. With an eye in reaching out to over 13 million students across the federation, ACADASUITE has been lauded by industry stakeholders as “welcomed development”

In Nigeria today, over 13.2 million kids out of school, two out of every three kids that do not have access to early childhood education and over twenty states of the federation unable to access counterpart funds through the universal basic education commission (UBEC) this with over thirty percent illiteracy level in the country, Acadasuite has been designed to address these aforementioned challenges.

Speaking to the media at the unveiling ceremony, Mr. Iheanyi Enyika, Managing Director of Norak Technologies Limited, the owners of Acadasuite said “Acadasuite is product that is focused at educational space. We are looking at ow we can be able to provide quality, affordable and accessible education solutions in the country. Though it has existed for over five years now, but on a low scale. There are lots of advantages in this solution considering the impact that we want to make in the educational ecosystem. Our solution impressed the AfDB last year during the “African versus Virus” program. “

“Acadasuite has branches such as school management software where school can manage their daily activities, then we integrated an e-Learning solution where students can learn remotely and teachers upload their content and can be seen via live feed. We also discovered that we had a lot of aversion or little capacity in the area of IT appreciation and deployment in various schools. We are using this solution to bridge these gaps. This Acadasuite content makes it possible to access contents without hiccups and can be bundled in a device for those in remote areas “. Enyika added.

With as low as N200 (Two Hundred Naira) per subject, ACADASUITE is a novel digital platform that offers quality, accessible and affordable education to all learners in Africa, starting with Nigeria without the underlying limitations such as Electricity, Internet and Expensive devices. ACADASUITE has the capability to provide a unified curriculum for schools in Nigeria. The overall objective is to reduce the cost of quality education, make it accessible in rural areas. Not only providing content, there are stringent quality process that teachers would pass through before their content would be uploaded. Norak Technologies Limited took a look at various teaching methods and choose the best. In a country where there are various teaching styles from British curriculum, American Curriculum and Montessori method, Acadasuite is bringing a convergence of these teaching methods to bring a unified learning platform.

The platform has been described also as a revenue earner for teachers that their content(s) would be uploaded and also a source of employment to graduates that are good in selected subjects all over the country.

ACADASUITE will contribute to social stability and economic advancement and also support disadvantaged children and the girl child education drive.

The platform makes learning to be customized to suite the learners’ need, strengths, skills and interests. Teachers will learn how to deliver their very best to meet the needs of individual learners  and contents are created by world-class educational consultants to assist students, teachers and schools “, Iheanyi Enyika concluded.

Anthony Emeka Nwosu

ACADASUITE will contribute to social stability and economic advancement and also support disadvantaged children and the girl child education drive.

About Chibuzor, He is the Co-founder and Executive Director at Seamfix. With over thirteen years of experience in ICT, under his direction Seamfix has successfully developed and implemented multiple mission-critical technology solutions for various industry verticals in both the Public and Private Sector.Chibuzor’s skills cut across product development & management, strategy and business development. He is also passionate about developing and empowering the next generation of leaders.Chibuzor holds a First Class Honours degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and an MSc. in Computer Security from the University of Liverpool (UK). He has attended executive courses at Harvard Business School and is an Alibaba eFounder Fellow. He is also an alumnus of Stanford Seed Transformation Program 2020.

Q1. Can we know your core areas in your ICT ecosystem?

For over a decade, Seamfix as a leading people & software development company has been at the forefront of digital transformation in Africa. We are on a mission to improve the way organizations work by digitizing the existing processes between them and their customers to deliver a high quality of life and happiness for all. Our core areas of focus are: • Identity management solutions for SIM registration & KYC for Telcos and other corporate organisations

• (Biometric) Identity verification solutions

• Data Capture and Analytics solutions

• Transcript digitization and Academic records management solutions

• Revenue Management Solutions

We empower organizations in the Telco space, financial institutions, regulatory bodies, FMCGs, security industries and tertiary institutions with the right technology solutions to meet their respective needs.

Q2. As a biometric solution provider, can we know about your solutions like BioRegistra & BioSmart?

We developed BioSmart because we realized that there was a need for large organizations and government parastatals to conduct end-to-end biometric registrations while meeting all the regulatory standards & requirements for identity enrolment from text to images and fingerprints. When it comes to biometric data capture, organizations and the government are faced with many challenges. To mention a few, some of these issues include KYC compliance issues, data storage and integration issues, identity theft. Our solution, Biosmart has been highly valuable as it has served National Identity focused government agencies like NIMC as well as the telecommunication sector in automation of their customer acquisition business processes where KYC/identity is core during SIM registration. The adoption of Biosmart has offered its users offline biometric registration, data integrity, faster customer onboarding, real-time verification of customer information, thereby reducing fraud.From our experience over the years of providing this data management solution,BioSmart, to Telcos, we discovered that there was a need for other small businesses and individuals to acquire high quality data to make day-to-day business decisions and automation. However, due to the cost of deploying this enterprise solution, these small businesses were unable to afford it. This birthed a need for Seamfix to develop a cloud based solution known as BioRegistra which affords all organizations the opportunity to subscribe and utilize our solution to collect and manage data from the field either using agents or directly from their customers.Bioregistra comes with a highly flexible form integration tool that enables organisations to configure any type of data fields they wish to capture and proceed to deploy this for data acquisition both offline and online. The acquisition is done via multiple channels – mobile, web and desktop apps as well as APIs. Due to its dynamic features, it can be applied across multiple industries such as security organizations who want to identify where each security operative is located at the same time, grant givers and non-profit organizations who acquire daily data on the activities and impact of their grants, FMCGs who want to know where their outlets are positioned across the country and banks who want to increase their customer touchpoints and onboard more customers without needing them to visit the banking halls. Many organizations across these industries have and continue to utilize Bioregistra to meet their data collection needs.

Q3. Your solution, Verified, has been around for some time, can we know a bit about it and how well affected it is in the market?

Verified helps organizations perform online, automated KYC checks (identity and address verification) on their customers as part of their processes for onboarding and to comply with regulatory requirements. This is particularly useful in the financial industry for example, where KYC is mandatory, or for employers who have a need to verify the information of their staff and blue-collar workers. Many other organizations in other industries with similar needs also find it useful and, in the post, COVID world of today, we have been finding more and more use cases brought to us by various organizations.

Q4. How would you say Seamfix is helping to digitally transform organizations to achieve high levels of productivity and better service delivery?

If you consider the world we live in today, given the current pandemic; you will realise that businesses that were optimized for delivery even without dealing physically with their customers were able to thrive and those that did not had to suffer. Our company’s mission is to empower the way organizations work by digitizing the manual processes between them and their customers to deliver satisfaction and a higher quality of life for all and our products and services help us daily to actualize this mission. To go into more detail, during this pandemic, we had various banks that utilized our solutions for customer onboarding which tripled their customer acquisition target. Even though the banking halls were closed, these banks were able to leverage their mobile app and staff strength to acquire customers and sell services to them. This is what digital transformation can do for organizations in the modern world today. In the Telecommunications sector, we had the Telcos utilizing our services for customer onboarding and we also saw a rise in their customer onboarding because people could make use of these services in the comfort of their homes. If you want to grow in the 21st century, your business ought to have a clear-cut road map to digitally transforming its business processes and operations right about now.Today, we have some organizations piloting our revenue management system -Billable – to help them automate and humanize their processes around billing, revenue collections and service provision to their customers, particularly at this time where self-service and remote services are key to a fulfilling customer experience. Seamfix enables organizations to gather insights into what is going on in the business which helps in making informed business decisions from the data collected. With our solutions, we also ensure that the organizations we serve have more access to customers and can improve on their service quality for better customer experience. This aids business continuity and increase in revenue.

Q6. Do you think that the regulation- NCC is doing enough to deepen investment in the telecommunication space?

The role of the regulator is to create an enabling environment that provides a level playing ground for everybody and to ensure stability in policy. NCC has been playing this role over the years to make sure that an equal playing ground exists across all investments in the Telecommunications industry and they have been stable in terms of their activity and guidelines for operations in the sector which is geared towards providing equality in the system. As you are aware, the regulator is already making considerable effort to create a holistic database in the Telecommunication sector which will provide required data as to the potential size of the market that is likely going to attract investors and also ensure the safety of the consumers of the Nigerian Telecommunication service. However, there is still much work to be done in terms of creating the necessary digital infrastructure and consolidating the SIM registration data across multiple Telco networks which is why the government has pushed for the inclusion of the NIN as part of the data captured during SIM registration. Though the government has made some moves, there is still more than enough room to deepen investments on training, building the required IT skills and digital literacy as well as bridging the gap so that people from low-income and rural areas are able to gain some of the skills needed to thrive in the digital economy.

Q7. You offer Holistic Process Digitization; can we know how this has been deployed in the public sector?

Interesting question I must say, our expertise in process digitization in the public sector spans over 9 years. In 2012, we partnered with NIMC to provide a digital desktop platform for citizen enrollment into the national identity database which is currently ongoing. Today, we have been appointed by NIMC to deploy a mobile android solution for the same purpose which will provide Nigerians the access and flexibility for NIN enrollment. In the past, we have partnered with over 13 states of the federation to eliminate ghost workers by enabling them with a digital biometric enumeration solution which helped the government clean up their payroll saving them heavy costs. We have also helped federal institutions of higher education to digitize academic records and enabled transcript request management. As mentioned earlier, we are currently helping a number of MDAs to automate their revenue collection process with our latest innovation “Billable” a revenue management solution for organizations to manage billings and collection of revenue.

Q9. Tell us about the solutions you offer tertiary institutions today?

In tertiary institutions today, there are reported cases of missing documents or files from academic records departments, due to existing poor archiving and retrieval facilities. Given the increasing number of students in the school, manual search for these files can be difficult. If there is an occurrence of a natural disaster like a fire incident or flood, such records will get destroyed and may never be recovered. Overtime, we also discovered Alumnis of the schools travel far & wide from their different locations to these schools just to make payment and get their transcript processed manually. The turn-around time in fulfilling this could take days or even months as the case may be. We recognized this was a common problem across most Universities in Nigeria who currently face consistent untreated transcripts request, compromised academic records, academic data lacking integrity, lack of storage, poor internal generated revenue growth and lack of analytics for proper administration and oversight for the responsible department .In this fast-paced technology driven world, people want services that will be more convenient, provide solutions faster and take away unnecessary stress and discomfort which got us thinking. We then carefully designed iTranscript, a flexible, robust, enterprise transcript solution which enables Alumnis make online payments for their transcripts, track it from the point of payment to the point of delivery without needing to go to the schools. For the tertiary institutions, our solution digitized the entire institution’s academic records where we have created a digital warehouse that is highly secured and accessible, such that one does not need to physically scramble and search for Alumnis & students records. Just by a click of a button, one can access these students’ information and the digital warehouse provides a safe storage for these academic documents till perpetuity. With iTranscript, tertiary institutions can boost their internally generated revenue regardless of geographical location and they can also generate business intelligence and data analytics reports from their available data. Our solution also provides identity management in schools to eliminate exam impersonation and other security issues within the university. We have been able to achieve this by utilizing our IDQR technology, which helps verify and manage identities within the school and provide for offline verification. We have successfully deployed our solution over the years in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka & UNICAL respectively and we are still looking forward to launching in other schools in the coming months.

Q10. What are we to expect from you this 2021?

Our expectations for the year is to be one step closer to our vision and goals.Seamfix is proud to announce that we have acquired ISO 27001 and ISO 27701:2019 certification & ISO 27001 certification, an internationally recognized and accepted standard that ensures our products and services meet the needs of our customers and clients through an effective information security management system.It is worthy to note that Seamfix is the first in Nigeria & second in Africa to get its certification. Our CEO, Chimezie Emewulu who has pioneered the Seamfix vision alongside other members has emerged the winner of the Nigerian National Legacy award category; inspiring business leaders. This award has consistently honoured great Nigerian business leaders & captains of industries. It is also rated by Forbes as one of the most reputable awards in Africa.Seamfix will be working on many groundbreaking projects this year, but most importantly, we’ll be delivering satisfaction and quality service to our customers; one of which involves revolutionizing the traditional methods of revenue management in the public and private sector through process automation. To enable us achieve this, our newest solution “Billable” just launched this month and Tech & Biz NG is the first to know With Billable, government, MDAs, public & private organizations and professional bodies can generate 4x more revenue and reduce management time with an intuitive revenue and billing management platform that pools everything you need to know in one place. Picture this scenario, where a corporation like Lekki Water Works or a residential estate like VGC for example, wants a real-time account of the number of homes that water / various amenities has been supplied to in the last year for reconciliation, tax and other purposes. Our revenue management solution, “Billable”, automates the process of billing, tracking and aggregating all payments across the organization on a central dashboard. This will simplify transaction management of the organization and provide transparency into who paid, when they paid, where the payment was made, how much the payment is, who has not yet paid and how much is left to be paid. Organizations who deploy “Billable” this year are set to achieve increase in revenue, efficiency in service delivery, streamlined operations, transparency, accuracy, incentive management, intelligent planning and revenue forecast. We are also in the forefront of enabling NIMC to achieve its core mandate of enrolling all Nigerians into the national identity database. We provided the android NIN enrollment solution that is guaranteed to provide access to NIN enrollment to all rural areas and locations in Nigeria. Seamfix is dedicated to improving the way organizations work by digitizing the manual processes between them and their customers to deliver satisfaction and a higher quality of life for all.

Overtime, we also discovered Alumnis of the schools travel far & wide from their different locations to these schools just to make payment and get their transcript processed manually. The turn-around time in fulfilling this could take days or even months as the case may be. We recognized this was a common problem across most Universities in Nigeria who currently face consistent untreated transcripts request, compromised academic records, academic data lacking integrity, lack of storage, poor internal generated revenue growth and lack of analytics for proper administration and oversight for the responsible department