 Welcome back. It's still the breakfast on Plus TV Africa to the first conversation for today. Creative problem solving is a way of solving problems or identified opportunities when conventional thinking has failed. It encourages you to find fresh perspectives and come up with innovative solutions so that you can formulate a plan to overcome obstacles and reach your goals. As we explore what it is, the CEO of Helpmom, a youth advisor for World Bank on Solutions for Youth Employment, Dr. Abiodou Adirini, joins us now to look at its key principles and provide a model that can be used to generate creative solutions vis-à-vis SDGs and other developmental issues. Many thanks for joining us, Dr. Adirini. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for having me. It is indeed our pleasure. Let's get straight into creativity and innovation in problem solving. It just sounds like some concept that has been studied in school. Can you break it down for us? We are celebrating the Creativity and Innovation Day today, which actually is meant to show how creativity and innovation can help achieve the sustainable development goal towards 2030. And the importance of that is that the UN has seen that when they set the goal, the Millennium Developmental Goal between 1990 and 2015, and it wasn't achieved, they've seen the reason why innovation and creativity can help speed up the achievement of the Sustainable Developmental Goal towards 2030. So if we look at education, if we look at healthcare sector, the best, the bedrock, innovation is the bedrock for continuity in any business. And for us to achieve that, we must be able to keep innovating, must be able to solve problems in new creative ways to be able to achieve the sustainable development goals. So let's even, you know, delve to this sort of path, which I think that you probably might be an authority or have some subtle experience. The health sector, for us in Nigeria, you see how the health sector is. And a lot of people have argued that if you look at our budget allocation, budgetary allocation over time, it hasn't even met, you know, the required standard. So we constantly struggling and grappling between 7% compared to the Abuja declaration when we talked about, you know, 15% and what have you. So how do we now manage this? Now we're talking about meeting developmental goals. How do we now get innovative when we have less allocated, you know, to the budget sector? Yeah, if you look at it, if you look at it in 2001, Chief Olibe Shagun, the former president of Nigeria at an event with the WHO, declared that before 2007, 21% would be allocated to health. And at the moment, we still have 7% allocated to health. And we cannot say we want to keep waiting for the government to solve the problem we have in Nigeria. The private sector leaders and local leaders need to partner together to facilitate good health care solutions and good health care problems. One of the things I've come to realize is that in countries that have made progress in terms of improving their health care sector, there has been a form of partnership between the private leaders and the grass root leaders. So what I mean by grass root leaders, people that are solving local solution, losing local innovation to solve local health care challenges in communities. When we have private leaders, when I mean my private leaders, I mean the banks, the corporations coming together, putting their sales to support these people. Because if we have to wait for the government, the government is not ready to do anything. And that's the truth. I mean, we don't see anything changing between now and 2024. We don't see anything changing between now and 2029. If we say we want to keep waiting, our budget is still going to be at 7% for health care. So the best way we can speed up innovation, the best way we can solve the health care challenges we have currently in Africa and in Nigeria, is to see more local leaders, more private leaders working together to solve problems and to solve... Just before, I mean, Justin, you know, Compson. Now, if you talk about that, which is very brilliant. I mean, it's very correct that you have, if you look at developed climes, you have that the private sector has always driven these climes. But we're still grappling with fundamental issues. We're talking about the issue of power. We're talking about the issue of security. I mean, there are hospitals that will take, for instance, the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, where you constantly have... I'm speaking because for firsthand information and, you know, being around that vicinity for a while. And so you have people constantly, issue of security where doctors have been kidnapped and people are kidnapped from the hospital. So these are, we're still struggling with basic things, access to good roads. I mean, when you want to even talk about the theas of government, you look at the primary health care, you know, sector. There's really almost nothing to write them about. So how do we even really achieve this in the midst of the fact that we're not even being able to meet with the basic things, fundamental issues? So how can the private sector thrive in a system where there's no security and you want to talk about taxation and all the issues? How? Yeah, so I think first of all, the government itself needs to make Nigeria business-friendly for innovators. That's the first problem that needs to be solved. First of all, I want to talk about taxation. When I'm a business-friendly, I mean, in the issue of tax, right? You don't expect the government charging a young innovator the same kind of tax they'll be charging banks, right? I mean, that will help us try. I think we talked about in terms of security. See, if we say because security is bad, things are bad, we don't want to do anything, we'll get stopped. We'll get stopped. And that's where the... It's not because we say that security is bad. It is just logical that if you don't have a safe environment, investors will pull out. We know how many investors, foreign investors that are pulled out of the country following all of the security concern and also local investors, who businesses have collapsed. And so the question is how do we now even get into this point and become creative in the midst of not being able to meet with basic issues, including, you know, the power issue, which is very critical to the health sector? Yeah. So what I'm saying is that these problems are fundamental, systemic, right? We can't... These are things that I don't have control over. These are things that innovators don't have control over. These are things within the government power sector. These are things that can be solved by them. So what I'm trying to say is that we don't have... We can't wait for them to solve this problem before we start working. And what I mean where innovators can work with private leaders is that in communities where private leaders are working, like me now I'm working in Ibarra. I'm working within the Southwestern community. We can have private leaders supporting us. There are a lot of innovators working in the grass-root community in Shuku too. They can have private leaders support them. There are a lot of grass-root leaders working in Kaduna, Kano, all these places that even have cases of Boko Haram. We can have local and private sectors support them in the best possible way until we have our security issues resolved, right? So the best way to go around this... So you talked about some places where doctors are kidnapped. We've seen in the U.S. where telemedicine is a big thing, right? And where trust is actually something that is being built in the system. One of the reasons why people don't trust some online consultation, some telemedicine consultation is that they believe that I can decide to stay beside the system and I can say I'm a doctor because there's no central data that can verify whether I'm a doctor. These are the things that civilize communities. These are the things that the U.S. have in place. So I think if the healthcare system can put some of these things in place where there can be good data and verification, things like telemedicine will strive, things like that. So you don't really need to go meet a doctor unless it's the case of surgery which you need and they like to actually... Yes, and doctors can feel more safe with their lives because they can attack the patient remotely. Okay, so we don't lose the essence of this particular day which actually talks about using innovation and creativity to solve most important problems. You know, when you said in your opening salvo how the nations of the world have moved from the MDGs and as the millennium development goes to the sustainable development goals, you talked about maternal mortality and one of the goals there is to ensure it is reduced to seven, that's to 10,000 best. So let's talk about the creativity and innovation specifically in that particular goal. What has been done in recent times creatively or innovatively to ensure that this particular issue of maternal mortality is actually brought to the barest minimum? Yes, so one of the things that can really reduce maternal mortality is access to healthcare financing. If you notice, Nigeria currently we lose 145 pregnant and two men daily and we have 814 dead per 100,000 live blood. One of the issues that is facing us at the moment is because of the healthcare system we have and there's no proper healthcare financing. And Nigeria has not been able to really do so much in this. One of the things I've come to realise is that the local innovators are really working and to make sure that we reduce maternal mortality to the barest minimum. One of the problems we have is we don't have good healthcare infrastructure. We don't have good places where people can have safe bed. Most of the delivery stay upon at home. Because I was going to say that people still patronise our TBAs. How far have we gone in that regard? In that regard, there's no provision the government is making. So let me talk about what we're doing at Help Mom. What we do at Help Mom is that because we know people go to TBAs, community health workers, we provide them with the tools they need to have safe bed. So you don't need to go to an hospital for you to have a safe bed. You can use our clean bed kits to have safe bed in your community. That's one of the things we do. And one of the things we're also doing now is that we are investing massively in research because we've noticed that the best way to solve issues and solve systemic problems is to invest in research. So we are not trying to do things in the conventional way that has been done. We are trying to use data to now provide solutions that can help solve this problem permanently, not just temporarily. So one of the things I will employ the government to do is the government need to invest more in research because when you invest more in research there will be new innovations springing up that can help solve some of the systemic issues we have in terms of maternal mortality and infant mortality in Nigeria. So let's talk about poverty as also part of the sustainable development goals and if you look at it in 2018 Nigeria had surpassed countries like India topping the charts and currently we're looking at 70 million people and with all of the data those were leaving at $2 probably looking at $800 an hour. I don't know if that's anything to go by with the current exchange rate but what innovation do we need to? We have seen politicians make very lofty and promising statements 100 million Nigerians would be lifted out of poverty 200 million Niger would be a very prosperous nation but in all of this we constantly see the standard of the living of the people and we see that including in the standard of living if you also look at the rate of resources in exchange you find out that there's no fairness and so there's always equality it feels like the system is created to make some group of persons constantly poor. What creativity and do you think first of all do you think we have been creative enough and secondly what kind of innovation how can we stepping at the government level as individuals to ensure that we get out of poverty? I think for the issue of poverty I don't think we need any creativity or innovation in that regard we just need to solve the problem by investing in women investing in people investing in women and investing in small-medium businesses women businesses and investing in small-medium businesses also Why specifically women and businesses? Because it has been proven that women manage money than men women grow businesses more than men so if you look at it even globally in terms of raising funds women at the low bottom of the pyramid I mean you have less than 1% of women that have raised over 1 million dollars why we have several men own businesses that have raised a lot so I think we need to the government itself need to start investing in small-medium businesses when you invest in small-medium businesses you create more employment for people when you invest in women businesses and when I mean women businesses I'm not talking about even creativity and innovation is not needed when I'm talking about women businesses in terms of farming these are things that has been neglected by the government and when there are more investment going into this they can employ more people and when they employ more people they will be able to create more job opportunities and they will be able to start lifting people out of poverty one other thing I think I need to mention also is that the government itself needs to create a good way in which people can export their product out of the country we are talking about the exchange rate we say $2 that's basically $2 is 570 Naira now and it's because of the fact that we don't have good exchange rate system if we have good export system in which people can start making locally made product and they can export it outside it's going to even help Nigeria in terms of its own dollar to Naira exchange rate because we have more influence of foreign currency coming into the country because of the export that we are providing so I think number one the government needs to invest in small-medium businesses number two the loan one other thing I forgot is that there must be low-interest loan provided also for businesses because one of the things you come to realize is that you want to get loan from the bank they are telling you to pay 18% and it's not even flexible so loans that are really flexible and have low interest rate in women-owned businesses and also investing in small-medium businesses let's take it one step further you've talked about the roles SME small and medium scale enterprises play in driving the nascent economy and you have also talked about the need for low interest rate to sustain that economy but let's really talk about creativity and innovation at the entrepreneurship level I'm a small business owner I have a business and I manage less than 20 people what kind of innovation or what kind of creativity do I need to bring on to the to my business on a daily basis so I can actually do things differently and actually get better returns so the best way you can be creative about your business is using technology right technology is one of the things that can help you scale fast technology is one of the things that can help you grow fast right and technology is one of the things that can be appealing also to investors to invest in your business I'll give you an example today so you know delivery we have something the delivery company you see a lot of people having delivery companies in Nigeria logistics and the like is the same logistic company that people like OPA is the same logistic company that people like both is let's not mention in brand the same logistic company they are doing why is it that theirs is more fascinating to investors because they've been able to master how to incorporate technology into what they do so as a small business owner you must also find a way to be creative to put technology at the core center of what you do so that you can be able because with technology you are innovating and when you are innovating with technology you can scale fast number one and also you can be able to grow faster so with technology so if you look at the sustainable goals it's quite encompassing it talks about quality education gender equality, zero hunger affordable clean water the list is almost endless with all of this but you want to begin to ask some of these things cannot happen on they just can happen in space without a safe environment and security as top on that particular list and so you want to begin to ask what's the creativity and innovation is there to solve the security problem these are issues because at the end of the day the sustainable development goals is looking at the standard of living of the people and these are some of the landmarks that have been put out to measure so you look at the quality of education and what have you so the question for us right here is what's the creativity that's required for innovation to solve security concerns that's on the one hand and as much as we know that security it's almost the responsibility of government that's on one side of it so how do we even solve this because it feels like this would just go a long way in solving other issues then I'll bring this quickly because we might just have to call it off now if you look at the banking center you've talked about innovation over time there's been several innovations that have been introduced but recently there's a lot of outburst and you see that being promoted by social media where people acting you find people conducting praise and worship sessions outside the bank because of the fact that problems are not being solved you also have people jumping counters and acting very rush so how do we manage all of this I mean it's a two on one question now so I think I'll take this to the end if you look at one of the reasons why we have like you said I used these two scenarios that you said people bringing doing praise and worship outside the banks and also people jumping counter which I saw yesterday the reason why we have this is that the banks are not accountable anymore like people are getting their money deducted for something they don't understand and one of the things I've really found is so well is that the banks are also communicating so you charge me now for yesterday the woman was like the charger said $750,000 from my account for what so I think this is not even a problem of creativity and innovation this is a problem of accountability they must be accountable to their customers if you are charging me $15,000 why are you charging me $15,000 and I notice one thing that the bank does is that they do these charges overnight so that you don't suspect so that you don't wake up it's like a thief in the night overnight when you're asleep I think accountability is what the bank must incorporate in what they're doing and that's one of the reasons why a lot of people are using fintech solutions because it's easy for you to hold them accountable if they remove any money from you like any fintech but that particular brand you are mentioning has also not been out of some of the issues I mean it was also being reported it was seen where a customer was being beaten, blue-black of course this certain brand so I totally understand that companies, the bank need to be very accountable but we also talk about some of these issues that should be solved with technology they have some of this technology that has been introduced you mentioned that sometimes you don't even need to walk to these places to solve the problem you can just sit back in the comfort zone and at the click of a button it's been solved so I really don't know how efficient technology has been that creativity and innovation has been in the banking sector especially in Nigeria I also don't think they've been creative enough and if they are not careful they will be out of business because of a lot of fintech and a lot of innovations coming up like I said accountability is key so I think one of the ways that this can be resolved is that the bank accounts with you let me know all the charges I have to pay be straight up with me communicate with me send them as text messages to me let me see them on my bank apps that these are the things I'm due for at this particular time of the month I won't have these kind of problems again and you mentioned the issues of security really say, when I think about security will I use technology to I mean productivity and its innovation let's look at the railway sector now I saw it somewhere where the railway was moving and the helicopter was actually escorting it I think that's innovation right but that's a lot of money being spent but it can be taken down that's a lot of money being spent so I think I support what someone said a governor said we need to bring in machineries by insecurity we have in Nigeria and I think at this state that's what we need but where does, before we let you go just quickly in 30 seconds where does all of this lie in the the new media and all of that I think for new media I think one of the things I've come to realize is that for the space of the new media people are not, people see it beats backward in some regards I see a lot of things happening in the new media outside the country where every content is being monetized so if I go on Washington Post now, or New York Times now, before I read any content I must pay for a month and I still see a lot of Nigerian companies a lot of Nigerian media companies not monetizing their content properly so I think for the new media if more monetization can come because now it has been shown and proven that content is king is king and it's going to be the next big thing so they should focus content creators focus on monetizing anything they want to do now alright thank you so much that's as much as we can take so you better start monetizing we're very used to having access to free things for instance, yes I think that Nigerians are not used to paying for anything and so that's why it's difficult for you to get a phone you know there's a certain phone you get apps very free you have to pay for almost everything and it's not our style so it has to take a lot for us to get to that point but also monetizing content as low as $1 per month is a starting point also you see some of these New York so there are some companies some magazines I read online from the western world that appear as $20 per month alright we've been speaking with Dr. Abiodo Nure he is the CEO co-founder, health mom and health and he has been talking to us about creativity and innovation, visa v sustainable development goes on how you can actually add it to your daily life to your businesses and of course impact on yourself, skill your business and of course again, grow the economy of the nation it's the breakfast that will take a quick break and when we come back we'll move away from this we'll be talking politics in a moment to join us again