The outbreak of Coronavirus has dealt debilitating blow to the national economies. ICT stakeholders say the sector could provide the key for re-starting the economy, reports LUCAS AJANAKU.
The outbreak and spread of coronavirus has shown that there are opportunities in adversities.
For instance, experts say it has accelerated the adoption of mobile financial services, which are being recognised as a tool to mitigate the use of cash in a world fighting the pandemic.
Already, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has set 95 per cent target for financial inclusion in rthe country by 2024.
The CEO, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof Garba Dambatta, said the availability of broadband services could contain COVID-19 spread, transform health and education delivery as well as promote financial inclusion across the country.
During a virtual meeting hosted by the Association of Telecoms Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) in Lagos at the weekend to weigh the impact of the virus and how to leverage the development, the Chief Executive Officer of VDT, Biodun Ominiyi, said the development has the good and bad sides to the economy.
He said while physical meetings have been reduced to virtual, consumption pattern has changed, adding that while retail has attracted huge demand at a huge cost and meagre profit, there was lull in the enterprise segment.
He urged stakeholders to encourage the development of local platforms to replace Zoom and others being used for virtual meeting because of its national security implications.
The CEO, Galaxy Backbone, Prof Muhammed Abubakar, said the vrus outbreak was a blessing in disgusie to the country because it brought attention to the ICT sector. According to him, cost has been saved by holding virtual meetings while in the area of e-governance, the potential of the sector was brought to the limelight.
The Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Inuwa Abdullahi, said hopes were not lost as the virus has brought to the fore, the convenience of working remotely. This, he said, is important to shaping the post COVID-19 digital era.
For instance, the business processing outsourcing industry (BPO) is an area he identified as possessing great potential for the country.
Abdullahi said the country has competitive advantage in BPO because of her time zone and accent, which he argued, is better than that of India and Bangledish.
According to him, the virus sent agencies and departments under the Ministry of Communications and Digitial Economy to the drawing board in line with the directive of the Minister, Dr Ibrahim Pantami.
The CEO, NigComSat, Abimbola Alale, said the development exposed the huge gap in infrastructure. According to her, the huge number of people that thronged out at the various banking halls and the attendant chaos there were symptomatic of dearth of infrsatructure in the country.
An engineer at Huawei Technologies, Aswani Kalli, said the guge jump in e-banking and e-commerce was very good. Like Alale, he stressed the importance of capcity expansion. To access the requisite hardware, he urged the Federal Government to prioritise forex exchnage (forex) access to the telecoms sector considering its role to other sectors of the economy, including national security.
The CEO of Pan African Towers (PAT), Wole Abu, said the outbreak of coronavirus led to distruption in supply chain, adding that people have also lost their jobs while the government revenue projections have taken a hit.
Abu said investment in infrastructure remained a prerequisite to revving the engine of the national economy
He said a funding gap of $136 billion was huge and a daunting task to be realised between now and 2025.
Despite an aggressive push by regional banks – including Ecobank, Standard Bank and Absa – to promote digital payment platforms, and the increase in adoption of electronic payments in several economies, the overall value of transactions is expected to be lower compared to that of last year.
This is according to a report by McKinsey, co-authored by Francois Jurd de Girancourt and Frederick Twum, along with contribution from other partners.
“Electronic payments revenue in Africa could decline by 10 to 13 percent in 2020, relative to the 2019 baseline, with a potential revenue loss of between $1.8 billion and $2.6 billion,” the report noted.
It added that the African electronics payments industry generated $19.3-billion in revenue last year, and approximately $10 billion of this “was from domestic electronic payments” that excluded remittances and cross-border payments.
Major platforms for electronic payments in most African countries include e-commerce, internet payments, mobile payments, ATMs, mobile apps and mobile money platforms such as Airtel Money, EcoCash and M-Pesa, among others.
Also, the World Bank has projected a sharp decline of 20per cent in global remittances, urging service providers and authorities to introduce measures to ease use of digital and mobile money platforms.
The global bank said with the projected fall, remittance flows to the sub-Saharan Africa region are expected to decline by 23.1per cent to reach $37 billion this year, while a recovery of four per cent is expected in 2021.
The bank had released a report detailing the expected impact of COVID-19 on remittances and the communities reliant on these funds.
It said remittances to low- and middle-income countries are projected to fall by 19.7per cent to $445 billion, representing a loss of a crucial financing lifeline for many vulnerable households.
The World Bank is urging easing of digital and money platforms due to the high costs associated with remitting money to the region from across the globe.
“Sending $200 remittances to the sub-Saharan Africa region cost 8.9per cent on average in the first quarter of 2020, a modest decrease compared with the average cost of 9.25per cent a year before. The most expensive corridors are observed mainly in the Southern African region, with costs as high as 20per cent. At the other end of the spectrum, the less expensive corridors had average costs of less than 3.6per cent,” the bank said.
It said due to the COVID-19 outbreak in countries where African migrants reside, including in the EU area, the US, the Middle East and China, it has become difficult to send money back home as these large economies host a large share of sub-Saharan African migrants and combined, are a source of close to a quarter of total remittances sent to the region.
Michal Rutkowski, global director of the social protection and jobs global practice at the World Bank, says: “Effective social protection systems are crucial to safeguarding the poor and vulnerable during this crisis in developing countries as well as advanced countries. In host countries, social protection interventions should also support migrant populations.”
KNOMAD, a brain trust for the global migration community, agrees with the bank on easing ways to remit funds to Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Quick actions that make it easier to send and receive remittances can provide much-needed support to the lives of migrants and their families. These include treating remittance services as essential and making them more accessible to migrants,” says Dilip Ratha, lead author of the Brief and head of KNOMAD.
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