 A near report that includes the Soviet opinions of 4,500 Africans from Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana has revealed that a recent wave of technology innovation coming out from the continent is changing how Africans view the continent even as it revealed that 9 out of 10 Africans that is 91.7% are likely to use technology solutions that are made in Africa. Many African countries fail to achieve their development targets partly as a result of underdeveloped and underused science and technology as well as limited invention and innovation by both the private and public sector. So just how do we build capacity? That's our focus on the show for today. Welcome to Business Insight in Plos TV Africa. I am Justin Acadone. First off, the Lagos State Government says there is no going back on enforcement of the ban on motorcyclists popularly known as Okada come September the 1st. The Commissioner for Transportation Fragico Ladende dropped this warning while giving an update on the ban at the Lausa Ikeja. Let's take that report as put together by Love Ikuku Oyidoku. It all began in June this year. The Lagos State Government ban operation of commercial motorcyclists also known as Okada in six local government areas and the respective nine local council development areas included all major bridges and highways of the state. After a review of its success, the government took a step further by extending the ban to four more local government areas and their respective LCDAs. This bring to 10 the local government areas where Okada operation is prohibited. The Commissioner for Transportation Frederick Oladende says there is no going back on the enforcement date. Before the last briefing, we had earlier reviewed the achievements and challenges encountered by the State Government through public engagement at the stakeholder forum tagged Okada ban. What next? Which was held on Tuesday the 16th of August 2022. In line with this development, the Ministerial Committee on Okada is here again to further emphasise on the need for total compliance with the Okada ban as the commencement date of 1st of September drowsiness in fact that is tomorrow. The government has also warned that both the riders and passengers' courts violating the order would be liable to three years each in prison while the affected motorcycles will be impounded and crushed in the public view. Anybody caught riding Okada, both passengers and the riders will be sent to jail for three years. The law backs it and we are very serious about it. So let's begin to think about this ban and what the government has put in place. The government is serious and the government would implement and we have all the enforcement agencies backing the government to ensure that we implement this ban in the 10 local government areas and their respective LCDs. The additional local government areas are Kosofe, Oshodi-Solo, Shomolu and Moshin with affected LCDs including Ikosishiri, Agboiketu, Isolo, Ejibo, Bariga and Odiolo. According to the Commissioner, the Nigeria Police Force with all relevant security agencies included the Army, Navy and Air Force within the state have been directed to complement the Okada Squad to stimulate seamless implementation and enforcement of the ban in the affected areas. From Lagas, Love, Ikuku Uiedokum, Plus TV News. Moving on to the Africa Innovation Impact Report which was compiled by Tolkien Jump Communications Consultancy that works with the African Technology Companies and Survey 54, an artificial intelligence-powered market research company a review that 4 out of 5, that is 84.6% of Africans stated that recent development in African technology had impacted the perception of the continent. Joining us now to discuss tech capacity building in Africa is the CEO and co-founder of Black, George or Mosul Jinnur. Black is involved in building tailored solutions for the African ecosystem to offer in technology as a service on a subscription basis. Thank you, George, for joining us on this show. Thank you very much for having me, Justin. Good to be here. It is indeed our pleasure. Let's just dive in straight to the topic for today, tech capacity building in Africa. You are an advocate for it. Tell us more about this. Yes, so I believe that tech capacity building is perhaps one of the most important things that we will do for the African economy and the reason for that is tech as a subject is a catalyst, right? And what that basically means is that when you have a solution to a problem, the tech component basically allows you to be able to solve that problem in a more efficient manner and to be able to replicate that solution across a larger group of people. And why this is important is because building capacity in tech has both social and economic impacts. Social from the standpoint of if you look at the African space, there are a lot of challenges and a lot of traditional solutions that we currently have in place. But once you introduce the tech component into that, so imagine that we build the capacity of the local tech talents that we have to turn out solutions, innovative solutions to these problems, what we will have is a plethora of diverse solutions to these challenges that we have. And that has social impacts. You know, you have more job opportunities obviously because there are more solutions and solutions give rise to job opportunities. And then from the economic standpoint, there's currently a global demand for tech skills. So obviously looking at the foreign considering like the foreign exchange standpoint, Africa is advantaged because naturally our tech services, you know, converting it to the global market currency which is the dollar is more affordable. So we stand to gain by actually investing in local tech talents because now you have a bunch of people that can offer professional services to a global market at lower cost which definitely drives foreign exchange revenue to this part of the world. So I think it's very important that we start looking into investing in tech capacity building because of these two major areas, the social impact and the economic impact that this has on the African. Brilliant. Telling points that you have actually mentioned but why focus on the continent when you could actually maybe get more demand or more a larger skill from just the country itself? So Africa is perhaps the most diverse continent on earth. It's very culturally diverse and if you even look at the map of the African continent on the globe you'd notice that the equator sets right in the middle and this naturally creates very diverse climate experience that we have. So when you factor in all these differences you notice that the African continent is actually perhaps the richest in terms of unique qualities. So what this means is that it presents us with an opportunity for exchange of value because you have something that Nigeria has that Ghana needs, you have something that Kenya has that South Africa needs and we just have all these differences. Whereas unfortunately in present times these differences have actually drifted us apart but what we actually have is a resource, a potential resource that if we can be able to harness the technological prowess in this part of the world to unify these various countries and these various sub-regions of the continent using technologically aided infrastructure then you have a medium for value exchange. So that's why we focus on the African area and not just on a single country because it's actually harder to develop a single country in isolation in this part of the world because you are at a disadvantage when you consider trade restrictions and whatnot. So we looked at it as being more economically viable for us to implement these solutions or encourage the advocacy of tech capacity building on an African scale because each nation stands to benefit from that corporate advancement in that regard. All right, in all that you said you identified some deficit in the tech deficit in the continent which need to be bridged. What have you done in that regard? So as a group and I use this opportunity to encourage other actors in this space we're looking at covering the entire value chain so from training and education to job placement the entire value chain of capacity building because a lot of people don't realise this but job employment is actually capacity building as well it's just that value is exchanged for capacity building. So we're looking at investing and we're already in talks with different partners in the space to actually be able to train more Africans with tech skills and we're hoping that more people can actually get into that initiative as well but not only that we're in talks with some of the global recruitment firms to see how we can be able to promote more African tech talents to secure job placements as well I believe that once we can cover these two areas the education module so to speak as well as the job placement module just basically invest as much as we can into these spaces we can definitely see a drastic improvement of tech capacities in this part of the world. I need to understand what it is that you really do because you have been talking about tech capacity and solutions but speaking about it really what you do, I need you to explain to me and how you've been able to get the buy-in of Nigerians because Nigerians are really apathetic when it comes to homegrown solutions so what do you do and how have you been able to convince Nigerians to accept homegrown solutions? Okay, so I think one of the values that we're looking to offer is that we've been able to aggregate multiple recruitment providers whereas a lot of companies focus on a direct mediation between engineers or job seekers or people looking to get into the tech space and just mediating between them and the clients but what we're looking to do is to become an aggregator referring to the educational aspect of it which like I said we're looking at getting involved in actively we're looking at aggregating multiple educators to see how we can provide people access to educational material over the internet so there are already companies who are providing tech education or tech training programs bootcams and coding camps and coding academies and what not and are currently rendering this on an in-person basis this limits the reach that those companies can have so as a company we're looking at how we can create platforms and infrastructures that can pool in these various contributors and offer what they have to offer to the African domain so that people can be able to benefit from these various contributors both in the education and the training sector as well as in the job placement sector we're really just an aggregator you can look at us as the bridge that's a good bridge alright you're still watching Business Insight and Plus TV Africa we'll take a quick break and we're just looking at building capacity in the tech sector specifically not just from Nigeria but for the continent that is Africa in a moment we'll be back to speak more with George Amoso stay with us welcome back it's still Business Insight and Plus TV Africa and we're looking at building tech capacity in Africa we have our George Amoso he is the CEO and co-founder of Black and Green Useful Insight on what we need to do to improve on our capacity as a continent alright thank you so much I'm George Amoso for staying with us beautiful idea that you have talked about but let's look at the African continent as a whole that report did very wonderful justice to us if you were to justify or give your own opinion how would you really say our work with technology or technology has actually impacted on the continent so obviously I feel like it's been a progressive movement so far it's been a very progressive journey I like the fact that the report highlighted that the African space is becoming more invested in actually patronizing African made tech products and services because prior to now there's been this narrative that if it's African then it's substandard and it doesn't meet global standards so I'm glad that the rise of these we have so many fintechs now in Nigeria and we have these different companies that are doing amazing work first of all I feel like it's changing the African mindset towards what African is capable of doing and this has the potential to further drive the investment of other African creatives and solution providers to create more because it's very encouraging to hear that people are actually using African made tech solutions and tech services so yes I think that's my take on that Very interesting, I just want you to tell us more about what you're doing for young people I know that you started a more like a talent program I want you to tell me about how the idea was best said and how Nigerians can indeed get on this particular platform and then build their own capacities Of course, so growing up I was opportunity to actually spend bulk of my life in two major African countries Ghana and Nigeria I don't know if it's Ghana Just joking This gave me very strong empathy for the African people just seeing these shared struggles that we have and shared challenges that we have so it led to the creation of the idea which is the black talent program that I talked to you about and basically what this aims to do is to first of all aggregate players in the educational and the training sector for the purpose of building tech capacity and also on the other end of the spectrum also aggregating job placement providers to allow people have I guess a more unified access to job opportunities so it's basically covering the entire value chain of, like I said, tech capacity building and for people to actually get involved they simply need to apply to our Okay, we don't need to get there but let's talk about that before you now get marketing, you know, so charge me just a little light but other big players in the Nigerian tech space are really doing enough to build capacity of not just Nigerians but also people from the continent Yeah, so I feel like the work that's been done so far is very commendable so I'd like to commend the players in the field and in the industry but I think there's still a lot we can do to really drive this development of African tech capacity so I'd really like to emphasize more investment in training in particular because we still have a lot of opportunities, there's a lot of demand for tech talents that we do not yet have to supply for so really just driving investment in training and in the initiation of boot camp programs and hackathons and these various endeavors that can allow for the African community to rally around the idea of tech capacity building. Just more investment in that space will really go a long way. So how do you see Nigeria playing out in the tech space really because a lot of people are really talking about fintech digital economy and it seems to be like leading. Just the other day the government released a second quarter GDP result and non or sector actually boosted economy and fintech is one of the major boosters right now. So don't you think it's actually a place or a sector that's in Nigeria or Nigerians should be actively involved knowing that the benefits or opportunities in that but less sector abound. Yes absolutely absolutely and I believe a lot of Nigerians are actually becoming more and more aware of this. Not too long ago I spoke with the lady who recently started her path towards a tech centered career and she's been in another industry for years but there's a wave of people becoming more aware of the direction that the world is taking. Everything on every industry has tech in its DNA in one way or the other. So just becoming more aware of the value that it has or that it poses to being tech literate and to developing tech skills is really something that I think is happening in this part of the world. Alright. It's still business inside and plus TV Africa who take yet another breaker this time around to be coming back to talk about business 101 George will tell us more about what he does as a CEO when he's not really working and some advice for young starters in a moment don't go away. And our guest is George E. Mousson. He is the CEO co-founder of Black and he's going to be telling us about how he started his business and what it takes to be a CEO and what he does when he's working over to you now George. So how I started so Black was founded in August. Actually I think that was around August 2020 that was around when the COVID pandemic was at its peak and I guess it became more glaring to us and by us I mean my co-founder, the co-founder and I it became more glaring to us how much Africa really needs or is lacking in terms of certain fundamental technological infrastructure because we became heavily dependent on technology. People could not move around as they used to. Life changed for a lot of people and people had to work remotely and what not. So this actually birthed the idea to start a company that solves African specific problems and that builds infrastructures that allow for people to be able to deliver their services over the internet and just connect the African continent a whole lot more using the internet for the facilitation of trade and to also yield job employment increases and what not. So when I'm not doing my work as a CEO at the desk, believe it or not I'm actually very passionate about music so I spend a lot of the time on my guitar or on the piano or just listening to music sometimes at other times I do read I like to research so sometimes I like to catch up on what's going on in other parts of the world especially in the tech domain and sometimes it's just family and friends and I like to spend time with the family and just relax and chill. So for startups? So just to the startups out there I would say just keep going it helps to have a really solid clarity as to what you're trying to solve as to what you're trying to do so once you have that just keep going really there's been a lot of setbacks that we've had as a group to solve these problems that we're very passionate about but it helps to really just keep going share your ideas with people don't be afraid to share your ideas with people you'll be surprised by the support that you can rally because there's a saying that when an idea has come there's nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come so just keep at it that's some very very wonderful useful insight that I shared by Georgia thank you so much Georgia Georgia CEO co-founder of Black and together we have been looking at building the continents and capacity in tech thank you once again for your time thank you very much Justin that's the size of the show for today I am Justin many thanks for watching see you again next time bye for now