TECHDIGEST – Centre for Information Technology and Development, CITAD, has condemned the collection of social media handles of customers by banks.

CITAD made the condemnation recently at Kano office through press statement signed by the Executive Director of the organisation, Yunusa Zakari Ya’u.

It could be recalled that in the last three weeks, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu accented to the Data Protection Law. The intention of the Act is to protect privacy and personal data of the citizens. Among the mechanisms put are to minimize the extraction of personal data from people, to provide a limit to how long it can be stored before destruction and provide for the consent of data subjects in agreeing to part with data about themselves.

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CITAD stated that It is not clear what value social media handles will add to the customer portfolio which currently has such unique identifiers as NIM, biometric details, emails, phone number, etc. Collecting social media handles is therefore in the class of over specification, requiring data more than that is needed for the banks to handle their relationship with their customers.

“By mandating banks and other financial institutions to collect social media handles, this will make banks to demand that all account operators must have social media handles. This amounts to compelling citizens to open social media accounts even when they do not see its use.

“Given the multiplicity of social media platforms, this will place unnecessary burden to many people. Why should people, against their wishes be forced to register on social media accounts?

” Is the CBN acting on behalf of platform providers who make money out of accounts that citizens operate on their platforms?

“Who bears the costs of these handles when, as Twitter for example is contemplating to start charging for accounts?”

CITAD also stated this new policy by banks will further increase the number of people who are financially excluded, a number that is ridiculously large even as people who have no social media accounts will then not be allowed to operate bank accounts. Rather than the CBN to focus its attention on how it will promote the financial inclusion of those who are identity excluded (due to lack of digital infrastructure to capture these in the national identity management number registration), the CBN is looking for easy way to join the bandwagon of government agencies that want to penalize free expression in the social media platforms.

“This directive usurped the powers of the Nigeria Data Protection Commission which has the powers as provided in the Article that give the Commission the powers to by “regulation prescribe types of personal data and processing to be exempted from application” of the Act.

“Since the Act came into effect, social media handles have not been classified as a data that can be exempted from the application of the Act and if the CBN feels that should be done, it should submit a request and following a public debate on the request, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission can then make a ruling on it. But until that is done, the CBN directive is illegal, and in contravention of the Data Protection Act,” CITAD added.

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By Y.Z. Ya’u

TECHDIGEST – Today, Wednesday, March 22, 2023, the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) is observing a national Media Day of Action on Digital Rights in Nigeria. The day which is being marked with a variety of activities such as radio discussion panels, lectures, twitter blast and Facebook live, among others, is meant to sensitize the public to the importance of digital rights, raise citizens awareness around it and engage government with a view to creating the necessary conductive environment for the respect for and flourishing of digital rights in the country. One of the expected outcomes is to catalyze citizens voice to demand for and activate their agency to promote and protect digital rights in Nigeria.

This is very important given the two contradictory development in around digital eco system in the country, both driven by the government. On the one hand, government is rushing for deep penetration of digitization of the society in line with its digital economy strategy and policy which has seen the hasty implementation of a cashless banking policy in the last three or so weeks that has resulted in untold hardship on the part of the ordinary citizens. On the other hand, in spite of its embrace of the digital economy, government is not comfortable with the political economy imperative of the digital economy, which must allow citizens to access and use digital platforms to not only access and use information but also to express their opinions and to, more importantly, hold government and its officials accountable.

This latter development has seen government clamping on citizens, including the arrest and detention of a student who made a twitter comment about the wife of the president, the detention of several journalists for reporting corruption and unaccountable conduct of government officials, etc. 

Digital rights are really not new as they are mere extension and projection of our fundamental human rights in the context of the information society. For instance, the right to freedom of expression online means the right for citizens to freely use the internet to express themselves, the right to freedom of association has found expression in a similar version online, the use of digital spaces for associational life.

The right to education implies the ability of citizens to use the internet to access educational opportunities and to engage in education processes. 

The notion of digital rights being imperative is the logical conclusion and implication of the online migration of governance processes. Today, many governments, including that in Nigeria, have migrated their services and processes online such that citizens can only access these services via the internet.

The most visible of this in the country is that application for admission to institutions of higher learning in the country is online and all the processes involved are also necessarily online. Getting a passport, voter’s card, vehicle license, etc have also all moved online, and from last three weeks now, everybody in the country is required to carry out financial transactions and engage in commerce and associated activities digitally. 

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This online migration of governance and its services, means that unless citizens have access to the internet, they will be excluded from not only the governance processes but also in benefiting from the services of governments. Also, the migration of education processes online mean that accessing education requires the internet. Since education is a right, the tool with which to access education (a right), that is the internet, must also be a right.

The current hardship that resulted from the implementation of the cashless banking system is due to the fact that many Nigerians are experiencing simultaneous digital and financial exclusions which are linked.  If you live in an area where there is no internet, even if you have a bank account, you cannot access your money and therefore cannot carry out any financial transaction. This is why the United Nations has accorded internet the status of a right, falling into what normatively is referred to as fourth generation of rights. In line with this, it launched the Campaign of Leave No One Behind, that is digitally.

We are just coming out from a grueling election period. One of the simple requirements of the credible election system is transparency. One way the election management body could assure such transparency is the use of open but secure digital transmission of election results from the polling units up to the final collation points at which the results are announced. This can only be possible via digital systems.  In this, it is important not only for citizens to access but also for government to ensure that its agencies have the necessary digital systems to with which citizens can audit their performance. 

It is thus important that digital rights are available for all citizens. They cannot assert and enjoy their citizenship with accessing their digital rights. Government itself cannot guarantee these rights without ensuring that the infrastructure for citizens to access their digital rights is available. 

But while government is upbeat about the economic benefits of digital technology, it does not seem to think much about ensuring that citizens should have access to and use digital technology. There are five critical factors that determine whether citizens are able to use digital technology for both personal development as well as tool for political participation. 

The First is that they need to understand what digital technology can do to their life. Government has responsibility to raise about on this. Government agency with mandate to do this, notably the National Information Technology Development (NITDA) is doing some awareness building engagements, but it needs to do more. 

The second is that government needs to find ways in which it should extend digital infrastructure to all parts of the country. At the moment, figures by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) indicate that there are 97 clusters of communities, termed as underserved and unserved communities where access to digital signal is poor or not available at all. These clusters of digitally excluded people have a combined population of close to 30 million people.

Most of these are in the rural areas where private sector players find it difficult to go because they are not profitable largely as a result of the fact that the people there are poor and or the population is too small as to guarantee them return on investment. One of the ways governments can address this infrastructural depicts is by enabling conducive environment for the emergence and flourishing of community networks. Community networks, as seen in several other countries, are community-owned, community-designed and community-managed infrastructure to address community communication need.

While a few community networks exist in this country (including about seven set up by CITAD in different parts of the country), there are no policies to guide their operation and certainly no support from government to ensure their sustainability. Government set up the USPF partly to drive infrastructure to areas where market has failed to reach.

However, rather than supporting communities to mobilize their own endowments to address their infrastructural needs, the USPF has opted to be subsidize the private sector which places digital centres in communities as turkey projects delivered to government on cash and carry basis, lacking elements of sustainability. We must retrace out steps and look for models that will ensure sustainability if we really want bridge the internal dimension of the digital divide in Nigeria. 

The third factor for the effective use of digital technology by the citizens is that citizens must have the necessary skills to use digital technology. Digital literacy today is needed for all to live a happy, productive, and meaningful life in the digital world.

While the national education curricula have made computer studies compulsory right from basic education, the challenge is that most of the schools at this stage of the education pyramid do not have the necessary facilities to provide digital skills and do not even have a clear understanding of what digital skills look like.Instead, most pupils are taught about history of computers and the different parts of computer as computer studies. We must address this serious problem. We must also develop and implement serious national digital literacy programme.

While NITDA has the National Strategy which commits it to achieving 95% digital literacy in the country by the year 2023, it does not seem to have then required platform, coalition, and synergy to achieve this. For the moment within government, digital literacy is seen as the responsibility of NITDA alone and not a collective and shared one of all stakeholders, including state governments which owned most of the basic education schools in the country.

The fourth factor is to address the issues of affordable. This is an economic matter. Most poor people cannot afford digital goods and services in the country.  This is even worth for women who are relatively poorer than males in the country. As most research have observed that poverty has a feminine face in Nigeria.  The question of affordability is both technical and social matter in the sense that certain technologies provide cheaper services than others.

For instance, government has said there is a universal coverage of the country by Elon satellites, the Starlink system but the services of starlink are not affordable to more than 60% of Nigerians. The USPF second mandate was to equalize affordability by subsidizing the poorer sections of the population, but it is hardly doing this. 

Finally, government has to address the factors that inhibit the effective use of the internet. This include the preventing harmful content online that drives people away from the cyberspace, especially directed against women who are subjected to sexual harassment, weaponing the internet against them, and making them to internalize its fear and becoming reluctant in using. 

But more crucially, government must see the internet as a continuum of the civic space for citizens to live and exist and to perform their role as civic subjects. It must respect the right of citizens to a free and safe internet and digital space. It must respect the privacy of digital users and refrain from unnecessary surveillance on its citizens and enact and implement a regime of digital rights as provided in the current Digital Rights Bill that will not only ensure the protection and promotion of digital rights but also enables government to protect the rights of citizens from being abused by third parties. Government must also commit to the protection and flourishing of digital rights as not only a necessary requirement for the consolidation of our democracy but also as a precondition for the success of the digital economy transformation agenda of the country. This is our message today as we mark the Media Day Action on Digital Rights.

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TECHDIGEST – While discussing with participants of the Digital Livelihood for rural women and girls conducted by the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) and supported by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in Itas, Itas-Gadau Local Government of Bauchi State. I was taken aback by the repeated celebration of digital systems as capable of providing jobs at home for women.

The aspect was that the potential for women to work from home is culturally non-disruptive and should be welcome. Most of the girls were happy with this. The training of film and video editing as well as digital photography in particular seemed to excite the girls more than anything.

Some of them opined that with the cultural practice of having men celebrating weddings for example outside the house and women inside the country, women or girls who are skilled on film and video editing as well as photography could find ready-made market.

I can understand this as the girls live in the context in which the horizon of most girls is clouded by the ABU syndrome and all that all aspire to quickly get married and raise children. Independent means of livelihood comes a distant priority. The first time I came across the ABU was angry, why should all the girls want to go to ABU and not Bayero University, Kano. the university I was lecturing. My ignorance was revealed when one of them explained that ABU did not stand for Ahmadu Bello University but Aure Bautar Ubangiji (Hausa, loosely meaning “Marriage is a Worship of Allah”). For many of these girls, the first instinctive gut was that digital skills will enhance their marriage. Which is good in itself.

However, as the training continued to unfold, they began to imagine a different way of using their skills. Some see it as a means to improve their education, update and move to higher institution of learning. Some saw a window of venturing out into professions that they ordinarily consider outside their reach. For example, 22-year old Bilkisu Gambo Idris of Itas Local Government Area of Bauchi State explained that having learn a number different aspects of digital skills including website design, Coreldraw and Online Marketing, plans starts that her dream is to start an online business but due to the lack of capital is yet to start but the training encouraged and inspired her to further her education to the advanced level.

Hauwa Baffa Sulaiman of Itas community, aged 20 years described the training as an eye opener and the essence of her life because now she has started advertising her make-up business on the Internet especially Facebook and Instagram pages. Fauziyya Yakubu age 23, from Jamaare is now using social media platforms to advertise her digital skills to train other women at home. She has found an add up way of addressing the gender digital divide by driving digital skill lessons into the homes that were initially a block against further learning.

In the end, they came to accept digital skills not just as something that will make them better wives but also make them better human beings and living a meaningful and productive life. However, it will seem that in this logic, the emancipatory aspect of digital skill is undermined and subverted and re-directed by a patriarchal conditioning, making the question pertinent: is digital skills enough to address the economic and political marginality of women?

Clearly, women are politically excluded in the country. But more than even patriarchal control, the main factor for this is the economic marginalization of the women.

Women are relatively poorer than men and constitute the largest number of those living under the poverty line. It is for this reason that some researchers have referred to poverty as having a feminine face in Nigeria.

If the economic status of women can be improved, they will be able to engage as equal actors in the political realm and thus be in a position to address some of policies and practices that continue to hold them down. The poor economic condition of women has meant that they have a low affordability index for digital access.

Addressing the economic marginality is important to addressing the gender digital divide in the country. However, while it is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one.

The digital divide is not just about access and empowering women economically while important will not in itself solve the digital marginalization of women. And while skill is an important enabler, it too is not enough.

To deal with the gender digital divide in a subversive manner, we need to deconstruct cultural norms that inhibit the effective use of the digital technology by women. Surprisingly, the experience from the digital livelihood program shows a less controversial path in which two things worked out well.

First, men did not feel threatened by their daughters and spouses learning digital skills that will make them better partners to their husbands. In other words, seeing the seeming digital skills compatibility with cultural norms of the society makes it easy to break resistance and barriers to learning.

Second, once the learners get emersed, they get their horizon broadened. In this sense, there seem to be a double subversive appropriation of digital technology: first, patriarchy subverted the libertarian impulse of technology to drive it to domesticity.

Having accepted this, the girls then re-subverted this to go beyond domesticity and begin to make effective use of digital technology in ways that go to seed and enhance personal livelihoods for them, thus opening the way for independent means of livelihood and being active economic agents of their own.

Drawing from the above is the inescapable conclusion that bridging the gender digital divide is beyond addressing the four conventional pillars of awareness, availability, accessibility, and affordability.

No doubt, we all need to be aware about what digital technology can do in transforming our lives and society before we can make the efforts to embrace it. Embracing it of course requires its availability, which is beyond individual choices or effort we make.

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Government in particular has greater role in making digital technology available to the citizens, and particularly, to girls and women. What policies and programmes a government deploys to address availability will invariably play role in addressing affordability, though affordability is also beyond just technology policies because it is signposted by the economic status of the people. Finally, accessibility would include making digital education not just in the privilege colonial language of higher education but also in local languages that citizens speak and engage with so that they can see technology not as something external but as part of daily lived social being and a necessity. That means teaching digital skill in our first languages.

But more than anything, addressing gender digital divide will require an honest handshake across genders. This is because gender digital divide is part of the wider gender development divide and cannot be addressed in isolation of this wider issue. The exclusion of women in the policy spaces and other digital space spaces is not accidental. It is the construction and imagining of these spaces as masculine by patriarchy.

Addressing these requires understanding masculine fear of the internet.

Masculine fear about the internet is rooted in the reaction of men about the communication space that digital systems, particularly the internet have given to women. But it also seen in the fact while men think the internet will expose women to bad influence, they do not think that they too could be exposed to the same bad influence. Within the realms of power discourse, women who engage with the internet are demonized as wayward, of easy virtue and generally as “prostitute”, etc.

The handshake has to bring both men and women into a mutual dialogue on technology. Men and women should work to deconstruct the myths around the internet. Men and women should work together to discuss how the internet is a tool that can help rather than subvert family structures. Ultimately, men and women have to work together to overcome the constraints that patriarchy has placed before women in the use of technology. The handshake is not an easy conversation.

On the part of males, it signals acceptance to give up on some privileges while for women, it requires rethinking of normalized ideas.

The digital livelihood is one example of a handshake, a conversation involving parents, spouses, daughters, and other community gatekeepers. It allowed the fears to be on the table and in an open conversation, not on combating any social norm but on opening spaces for learning for girls to seek self-actualization. We need more of these conversations and handshaking to make substantive progress in closing the gender digital divide and ending gender digital marginalization in the country.

Y. Z. Ya’u of CITAD

The post Making Digital Skills Meaningful to Girls and Women appeared first on Tech Digest News.

TECHDIGEST – In a bid to actualise a sustainable digital economy through digital inclusion, the National Information Technology Development Agency NITDA), and Centre for Information and Technology Development (CITAD), commissioned School of Network Community (SCN) initiative with a view of connecting people from different communities and promoting access to internet especially in rural areas across the country.

The Director General of NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa, CCIE, revealed that 50 out of the 200 participants in the ongoing School of Community Network (SCN) Project will receive a Diploma in Advanced IT across 10 communities in 10 states.

Inuwa who was represented by Mr. Preye Itonyo, Deputy Director, Digital Economy Development Department, made this known at the virtual opening ceremony for the Second Phase of the School of Community Network (SCN) Project implemented by NITDA in collaboration with the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD).

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He said, “This training, starting from today will span a period of 3 weeks. The first 2 weeks will be dedicated to training on the basics of IT and upon completion, you will all receive certificates in IT”. 

“Subsequently, you will all be subjected to an examination and the best 50 participants from all the select communities will be shortlisted to participate in the Advanced Class which will be completed on the third week”.

“This means that only five of you within each community will be shortlisted for the advanced class. Once the advanced class completes, all participants will receive a Diploma in Advanced IT”, Inuwa explained.

He added that the second phase of this project is a sequel to the first phase and the trainees that were trained during the first phase will transfer knowledge to 20 participants in 10 communities across 10 different states.

The project which is taking place in Kano, Jigawa, Kwara, Ebonyi, Akwa Ibom, Oyo, Bauchi, Borno, Kastina, and Gombe states will have about 360 people trained in one month.

According to the DG, “the whole essence of this project is to provide all of you with relevant digital literacy and skills to build and sustain computer networks within your communities.”

He averred that this will help improve broadband and information access in their various communities and also help close the digital divide between their communities and the urban areas; considering that broadband penetration in Nigeria stands at 44.5%.

The Executive Director, CITAD, Engr Y.Z Ya’u, during his speech said that the training is part of promoting digital inclusion, noting that after the training, participants will be able to join millions of people who work online and can utilise the internet for various purposes including cutting-edge skills that can make them not just employable but employers of labour.

“Our hope is not just that you learn but that you utilise all you have learned”, Engr Ya’u said.

The SCN project will also help prepare citizens within these communities for the fourth industrial revolution which will be driven by digital technology and digital skills.

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