 Welcome to this interview with Smart Africa's Head of Digital Transformation, Innovation and Services. Dr. Raab Oyuni will be covering quite a few topics, including Smart Africa's financial inclusion activities, lessons learned from the COVID-19 outbreak and how to help consumers keep up with technology as it evolves. Welcome, Raab. Thank you so much for joining us. I'd like to start by asking you a bit more about Smart Africa and its aims. If you could give us a quick brief tour. Well, LJ, thank you for having me and thank you to the whole organization. This is great. This is an important discussion to have. Smart Africa is an alliance of 32 member states and head of states that work together in order to drive the socioeconomic development of Africa using ICT. So we work with the private sector. We work with over international organizations, and we have several projects, very interesting projects such as cyber security and financial inclusion. Thank you. And cyber security is an ever present risk. So tell us a little more about what Smart Africa is doing on this front. Yes, maybe before answering the question, if you allow me, I will go into some key observations. Oh, please do. Lovely. OK. The first key observation about cyber security in Africa is that you have a lot of disparity in Africa. You have some countries that are doing better than others, right, especially when you look at those five aspects of cyber security, which is legislation, legal framework, national strategies, existing open national strategies on cyber security in the country, the existing of teams such as search, which are the computer response teams for quick response against cyber attacks, the existence of training on cyber security and research institutions on cyber security as well, or even cooperation at a local level, international level. So when you look at those five aspects, you see a lot of disparity. So what Smart Africa is doing is like it's establishing this working group on cyber security and what they're working with going to do is like they're going to do an assessment of what's happening on the ground in the continent in all those different countries. And then they're going to work on the plan on how to assist those countries to level up, right, to level up, especially based on those five aspects. So this is one thing that Smart Africa is doing. Another thing that Smart Africa is doing is like it's also working on training because training is very important. I give you an example. If you receive a text or an SMS that is a scam, if you're not trained and you don't know about cyber attacks and what cyber crimes are, you can fall into that trap, right? So we have what we call the Smart Africa Digital Academy. We train government, policy officials from data authorities. And also, we train also regular people. The average population as well. Wow. I think training is such an important part of all of this. I'd like to ask a bit about mobile money and fintech innovations because obviously mobile money is particularly interesting for the continent of Africa. And I'd just like to know if there are fintech innovations disrupting financial inclusion in Africa? Of course. I kind of thought you would know this week. I kind of thought this week would have a nice long run. You know, traditional banks have tried so many things in Africa in order to reach to all those populations. But they were not so successful, right? Because Africa is another kind of environment. We're talking about people living in villages that are the wartime access cities because of the condition of the roads. And it even becomes like a safety problems. And what mobile money has done is like you said, it came to the population using the telcos, the MNOs, right? So now having a phone, you can have, for example, mobile banking on your phone. And this is just the beginning. It is the beginning. It will continue to happen. And what we observe now is like we have a lot of African fintech startups. They are becoming very innovative and are using kind of this model to innovate. Do you have any specific innovations that you are looking at that might enable more vulnerable people to access formal financial services? Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And if you allow me, I will talk also about COVID a little bit here, right? Because it was already happening, but COVID, over COVID is a terrible thing. I mean, when you look at health and the economy, but it's been truly contributing in the acceleration of financial inclusion. Three examples, digital payment services, OK? So before COVID, we didn't know that you'd be feasible to really have transactions cashless. Now we have a lot of transactions happening cashless, et cetera. And what we're seeing is a booming of e-commerce, for example, right? So you have a platform like Junior. And what's so unique about these African platforms is that they have this network of payments so that if you go onto this platform, you can pay with your visa card. You can pay with PayPal. You can pay with anything, including mobile money. Wow, that is fascinating. I mean, we have seen a lot of rapid acceleration of technology as a response to COVID-19 outbreak. In fact, our interview right now on the virtual platform is something that a few years ago might have felt completely out of place. So perhaps we can talk a little bit more about the innovations related to COVID-19 and how that may have further changed, not just the payment landscape, but everything around it. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, Elje. And I tell you something, this is quite fascinating what happened during COVID in terms of innovation, because then we had not only the private sector innovate, but I think for once, I would not say once, but I think that we have now also the governments innovate. COVID kind of forced the governments and the private sector to work together, especially in the health sector. For example, recently, I want to take my test COVID. I received like an SMS to tell me that I was negative. Thank you. And then like another example is in the education system. The government work very closely with, again, startups in the private sector to develop like online services, online education. So these are a few examples. And let me also give you this example that happens. That was like also amazing. It's like you have the MNOs, the operators working closely with the regulators, right, in order to take COVID measures so that we can decrease the fees of the transaction using digital payments. Wow, that's quite a big step. And to think that it took a pandemic to do this, it must be somewhat frustrating to kind of want things to go in this direction and the sort of challenge that kind of brings. I think maybe we can talk a little bit about the payment responses to COVID-19 and the lessons learned during this time. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I think we we learned three main lessons. Number one, cashless payments can compete against cash payments. I mean, this is huge. We never seen this before. Africa is a lot of informal businesses that use cash. And for once, like we have digital payments that kind of like were hired and the volume of digital payments were higher than cash payments. That's one. Second of all, what we're seeing is we're seeing governments using COVID to accelerate the digital transformation agenda of the country. OK, so now more than ever, we could pay our energy bills. We could pay so many, so many different things using online services established by the government. Third and last is, unfortunately, what we've seen also is a rise of cyber attacks. We talked about cyber security previously. And of course, when you have like the volume of digital transactions increasing, what you also have is the volume of cyber attacks increasing. And what kind of cyber attacks we've seen, we've seen cyber attacks to emails. For example, you would receive you would receive like a lot of emails, scams, people that will pretend that they have the governments to announce certain things so that they can steal money from you. And this is where it's again, I'm going back to training. And this is where it's very important to train the end user so that he's aware of such attacks. I think it's fascinating that there is such a wide spread of uptake through such a large alliance of countries. If you look at Estonia and its progress in moving its inhabitants to an electronic first kind of thing, I guess there are lots of lessons to be learned from from both sides, not just going in towards digital transformation, but some of the challenges that have come out of doing that. So maybe we can talk a little bit about how do you get over those challenges? So, for example, you mentioned a lot of the scam emails and the increase in cyber attacks, what's happening to address that? Well, to address those challenges, of course, like you have to take care of the infrastructure first, right? Because you have to make sure that the phone is secure. You have to make sure that your computer is secure. That's one. The second aspect about facing these challenges is at a national level. You have to make sure that, you know, it starts with the top in a way. We have to make sure that everybody is on the same line and they have like this harmonization happening so we all know what we're fighting against. And thirdly, I will again emphasize training, really training the scheme. It is very important because like what we call in the jargon of cyber security, we often looking for the weakest link, right? When you have like a cyber attack, is it the computer? Is it the cell phone? Is it the email, the servers? Or is it the user? And I like to believe that it is the end user that is a lot of times in Africa, not well educated about cyber crimes. It's an interesting one because even somebody who is well educated, you just catch somebody off guard and they will just click on something without thinking and that's all that's needed for an attack to be successful. So let's talk a little bit about this sort of end users, digital capabilities. And I think this is universal. This isn't just something in one country or continent. The people's use of technology. It's a very interesting area in that it doesn't it doesn't normally keep pace with the digital product evolution. Somebody who can maybe use a smartphone to take a picture may not be as familiar with a scam text, for example. So what can be done to help consumers use these digital services appropriately and responsibly? And obviously, I know you're going to talk a bit about training and education, but are there other things that we can bring in that maybe on the device or across the airwaves? I know that there are, for example, things like an automated blocking of binary over the air attacks on text message, things like that. But what other things are there that can help consumers do the right thing, as it were? Yes, and very good question, L.J., and you absolutely right. It's a universal problem that we have to solve. But one thing for sure is that when we develop those products and this is something that I'm trying to to really promote in small Africa, we need to develop those products based on the local context. Yes, the reason why mobile money or FinTech innovation is so big in Africa is because they they're doing it based on the local needs. Right? Mobile money came and responded to a very local need on the continents. And we have to do the same thing. I'm giving you like an example. Yes. The example that I'm going to give you is if like you go on Google and even if it's a Google that is for Rwanda, because like you can see my location, I'm in Higali and in Rwanda and you type beautiful baby on that Google search page, right? So the first one hundred images that you will find it will be beautiful Caucasian babies, which is fine. It's beautiful, right? But you're not going to find a lot of beautiful African babies over this Google is for Rwanda. And the reason why is because the project when it was made, you didn't have, first of all, like African experts in the in the room, which is important. We need to be part of these conversations so that we do design by the product by design. And second of all is because like also again, training, training and training. It's a very, very interesting point. And in my work as an music composer, I noticed there is a distinct lack of diversity in the music databases used to train AI. In fact, a lot of stuff is based, for example, on Western European English speaking music and missing out all the amazing subcontinent music from all over the world. So yes, I'm a big proponent of increase that data set. And I'm very glad to hear that there are many people who are saying that now, which makes me feel good and probably many other people. I'm going to close with one further question, which is a kind of open one, almost opening, opening the closing question. What what one thing would you like to be implemented going forward? Or what one thing would you like to change? You can choose either or both of those very massive open questions. Wow, this is this is a very, very nice question. Very good question. Yeah, I'm going to try not to disappoint. I'm going to try not to disappoint with your question. Thank you. This is this is the one thing that I wish to change. And I hope that it will happen very soon. What it is is that you have mobile money. You already have like a lot of countries where we form like you can sound like a digital payment from country A to country B, a lot of African countries. I think if we can get all the countries on the continent integrated and talk about like cross border mobile payments at a very low cost, right? Affordable and in a safe way. I believe this will bring us closer to this vision that we want, which is to transform Africa into a single digital market. Wow, that's an incredibly ambitious and worthy goal to have. And I wish you all the very best in achieving that. Many thanks to you, Dr. Rob, or you know, thank you very much. And I'm looking forward to the first four conversations. If you'd like to know more, please visit the ITU's website or go to smartafrica.org. Thank you very much.