AfriLabs 10th Year Anniversary Gala On 27/10/2021

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REMARKS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE AFRILABS 10TH ANNIVERSARY DINNER AND AWARDS NIGHT ON THE 27TH OF OCTOBER 2021

PROTOCOLS

Good evening, everyone. This is for me a most exciting evening. Gathered under the same roof are some of the most brilliant minds in our continent; innovators, entrepreneurs, soon to become owners of billion-dollar enterprises, creators of groundbreaking technologies in medicine, education, and agriculture, and I am told from 320 hubs across 51 nations!  I doubt whether any other gathering anywhere else in the world that can display such an array of talent, skills, and creativity as we have here today.

Our continent is indeed fortunate to have this incredible range of resources and resourcefulness and those of you here today are only representative of thousands of other innovation hubs, incubators, accelerators, maker spaces, technology parks, and co-working spaces, and of course start-ups all over Africa.

This is particularly exciting because of the large number of female innovators doing incredible work across Africa.  Some time ago I read a publication, Quartz Africa, and it recently published a list of female innovators and permit me to quote their description of these female leaders. I quote, “innovators who are building robots in Cameroon for waste collection, tackling freight logistical challenges in Ghana, addressing low insurance penetration in Kenya, bringing indigenous pastoralist knowledge from the Sahel into global climate change discussions, training other women in tech, blending creative math design with fashion in Nigeria, addressing energy financing in Tunisia, and investing in pre-seed funding across the continent.”

All of these happenings by women, and they are not only from the continent’s tech and innovation hubs of Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt but also from Somalia, Cameroon, Tanzania, Senegal, DRC, Chad, Tunisia, Uganda among other countries.

So, it is evident to even the undiscerning that Africa is set to leapfrog into the frontlines of the fourth industrial revolution.

But, Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe that you must see your roles as more than starting and growing successful businesses or social enterprises. We must also see and understand our place in history; our obligation to our countries and continent. And Rebecca Enonchong, Board Director of AfriLabs, just mentioned a few minutes ago that this is actually the Africa Union.

This is a continent that still has large numbers of persons living in extreme poverty. A continent with the lowest levels of access to education, healthcare, and nutrition. It seems to me then that history has handed you the task of fast-tracking the economic development of our nations, creating wealth for the millions of our people living in extreme poverty.

Barely 60 years ago, the first leaders of independent African states dreamt of a united and prosperous Africa. They spoke of one continent, one people, a people capable of becoming a political and economic powerhouse. As it turned out, that objective is yet to be attained.

But today that dream of Africans working in collaboration to create an economic powerhouse is achievable and at hand.  The key lies in a planned digital future; innovation, and the creative use of technology for enterprise and for development. And our advantages are obvious; we are the youngest planet, the vast majority of our population are digital natives, born in this digital revolution. Which explains why despite developmental constraints, Africa is still on course to disrupt the fourth industrial revolution itself with the sheer numbers of youthful talent and energy available.

This has been proven by the disruption that we continue to see across various sectors. In 2015, African start-ups struggled to raise about $200million but in 2021, we have more than 6 Unicorns. In FinTech alone, we have Flutterwave, Paystack, Opay, and Interswitch all valued at over $1billion each. In e-commerce, we have Jumia and of course, we have Ashraf Sabry’s Fawbry, an Egyptian e-payment company that allows customers to settle bills online and digitally and is now on the Egyptian stock exchange (I am told) with about 30 million customers.

MNT-Halan, Egypt’s largest lender to the unbanked has about 1 million monthly active users and has disbursed $1.7billon in loans to date. Tala is a start-up in Kenya that helps the traditionally underbanked people borrow, save, and grow their money and they have expanded to India, the Philippines, and Mexico and have disbursed close to $3billion of credit and has more than 6million customers.

Here in Nigeria, we have Piggyvest, a wealth management platform that at the end of 2019, has helped about one million users save about $80million. And in Senegal, Wave, a mobile money provider, became Francophone Africa’s first Unicorn when it received a $200 million injection of funds.

As Shah, a commentator observed, while Africa’s FinTech Unicorns are payments-focused today, in the future, we can expect more variety; digital lenders and insurers, Invest-tech, blockchain are also likely to feature. Of course, we should also expect unicorns to emerge in other sectors as well—companies that will help to address the continent’s key challenges in relation to healthcare, schooling, trade, and so on.

Much of the growth of African start-ups has been organic. And I think that this is one of the things that we need to address. Mostly operating as individual enterprises or at best as city initiatives, a national effort is still usually missing.  So, there is a need for positive action, proactive and intentional policies by governments to create the environment for start-ups and technology based on what every country’s policy may be.

I think that the general thing we have seen as Alex Liu, a Managing Partner at Kearny says is that what we need is “policy, regulation, finance, infrastructure, education, and talent all must all come together in an innovation ecosystem.

But I think the major thing is that we must see government policy, we must see clarity in government policy and government policy is probably one of the most important things we need to get right going forward. This is why I am excited about what we are seeing today.

I am excited about the fact that we are seeing a lot of collaboration with governments. I have seen in particular that part of the work that we have been able to do here in Nigeria is on account of the fact that young people who are innovators and who are working in the various hubs and all of that, are not shy to come forward and say “this is what needs to happen, this is what we need to do.”

I would just share very quickly some of what we have done in Nigeria. Not because this is a perfect story, but more to show what is possible and what can be improved on.

One of the first actions that we took in 2015 as an administration was to work with development partners to conduct an innovation mapping exercise across Nigeria. We did this by engaging the ecosystem across the country, including AfriLabs at the time, and this process led to a report titled “Catalyzing Growth in Nigeria through Innovation.”

In that report, we also examined international examples of successful hubs to understand what factors drive success and sustainability and how these lessons could be applied to Nigeria, with a specific focus on demand, supply, and the enabling environment as drivers of innovation.

So, with the results of this exercise, we supported more than 12 private sector-led innovation hubs across the country through our social investments programme in particular. Working with the World Bank and the Lagos Business School, we supported the establishment of the Nigeria Climate Innovation Center in Lagos, and in partnership with the American University of Nigeria and the International Committee of the Red Cross, we supported the establishment of Africa’s first Humanitarian Innovation Hub in Adamawa State.

We also established the Technology and Creativity Advisory Group which I have the privilege to chair, as part of our Industrial Policy and Competitiveness Advisory Council. This group, this Technology, and Creativity group is very important because it is made up of members from the private sector, many innovators, people in entertainment, and relevant stakeholders in the public sector and what they do is that they offer advice to the government on various policies and initiatives.

Some of the policy initiatives developed from the advisory group include the wide range of licenses issued by the Central Bank of Nigeria for FinTech because a lot of the FinTechs were already encroaching into banking services. Now, to get a banking license, you need a huge sum of money, N25billion. But these guys were already doing banking services and so we needed to get a second, third, fourth category of licenses and it took these young people who were in the technology and advisory group to advise on the sort of licensing that could be granted. So, we now have a wide range of licenses that are granted to Fintechs and to innovators in that space.

This Technology and advisory group also helped to raise about $500million in collaboration with the African Development Bank to raise to support technology and creative start-ups, venture capital, and investments.

All of these are purely on account of the fact that we are working with young people out there in the field who, of course, are doing the heavy lifting in these various areas. They also understand what the requirements and needs are.

We also took the view that governments must be the chief marketers of start-ups. So, we supported the tech ecosystem from the highest levels of Government since 2015. In 2016, Mr. President and I hosted start-ups here in Abuja at the Aso Villa Demo Day. We converted the Villa, where we are today for purposes of a demo day and we had Mark Zuckerberg as our guest at the event. In 2018, we went on a tour of tech spaces around Lagos and visited several start-ups, including Paystack and Andela. Later in 2018, we also led a group of Nigerian start-ups, venture capitalists and angel investors on a tour of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

On that visit, our start-ups pitched their ideas to investors and engaged with giants such as Google and LinkedIn. We also made considerable progress in several other different areas while we were out there. We are also, and Tomi had mentioned this earlier working, on the Nigerian Start-Up Act, I believe Mr. Aina is one of those who is also working on that in the private sector, there are so many people who are collaborating on the Start-Up Act. And we are expecting that very soon, the National Assembly should pass that Act because it would offer protection for founders and investors of start-ups.

Now, the truth of the matter is that there is a long way to go. We cannot even begin to scratch the surface with what has already been done. We have barely begun another work, that real work that needs to be done. And that is the case across Africa. I have studied very closely what African Governments are doing in support of start-ups and innovators and by and large, we are more or less doing about the same sort of stuff, but most innovators and start-ups are still unable to access cheap capital locally. Many complain that the processes for obtaining financial support ought to be easier and more transparent. So, there is still a need to train more, develop more, and to teach more.

In effect, and this is true of many of our countries in Africa, we are at a point in the odyssey of technology and innovation in which the big challenge is that of how to create the institutional architecture to safeguard and consolidate the progress already made. A few suggestions, first, our governments in Africa must ensure that access to support programmes is transparent and merit-based. We must work harder on providing cheap, patient capital, with a view to ensuring that innovators are able to access this capital.  For its own part, the ecosystem must work with governments to determine the parameters of access to these programmes.

Tech and innovation cannot and should not just be for profit, but for the public good. Technology holds the power to create gigantic, commercial ventures with huge returns, but the fullness of the transformative and revolutionary potential of the ecosystem will be achieved when we are able to address issues of the public good. And this Is absolutely important in Africa given where we are in development and given the sheer number of people who are denied access to the things that we consider normal and standard.

This means bringing our capacity for innovation to all the big developmental challenges such as social security, financial inclusion, access to healthcare, and access to education.

And while we pursue this and begin to experience the power of technology to transform lives, we must also concern ourselves with issues of ethics and oversight. As the debate around some of the major social media platforms is showing us, and I’m sure you are following all of these debates about privacy issues, and about how social media can be not just a force for good, but also a force for evil, those of us in the tech ecosystem must be alive not only to the prospect of profits but to the social and public implications of our work.

The access we have, the talents we have, impose responsibility on us. In this case, it is the responsibility to design algorithms and the sort of things that are guided for the common good.

The third is the huge opportunity opened up by The African Continental Free Trade Agreement. I am sure that we are all waiting to see that come to fusion. The objective of the AfFCTA is to make Africa the largest single, seamless trading bloc in the world. The opportunities for tech and innovation to build synergies across borders and create African tech giants are obvious. But even now, our FinTech and e-commerce companies can extend their reach, as they will be able to partner with other regional and international FinTechs to facilitate payments and make digital cross-border remittances. These are some of the big things that we expect to see with the free trade agreements. And I hope that we all take advantage of the agreements as soon as it begins to work.

The bright and prosperous future for Africa beckons on us. You all are the great titans that will take us there. We are all extremely proud of you and all of the work you do.

As I end, I must thank the Federal Ministries of Industry, Trade, and Investment, and Communications and Digital Economy, Make It Africa, and of course AfriLabs, and I mustn’t forget my people at the Office of the Vice President for the work that went into planning this event.

Finally, I congratulate AfriLabs at 10, and once again, I welcome you all to Abuja Nigeria. Don’t forget to taste the legendary best jollof rice in the world!

I wish you a pleasant stay.

Thank you.