All Quotes

"It’s not just about learning technology; it’s about empowering people to use it to solve real problems in their communities"

"it is always in our best interest to drive disruptive learning and innovation with world’s best practices. As a result of our partnership with Diamond Challenge, we foster learning through entrepreneurship, technology, and global citizenship amongst teachers and students in Nigeria and Africa."

"So, I am passionate about making technology more inclusive and accessible, and I’m thrilled that my efforts have resonated with so many people both online and offline including the over 100,000 followers on my various social media handles."

"This event brought together top government and global agencies officials including ministers of education, UNESCO, the ILO, the World Bank, and other major organizations."

"So, it’s been incredibly rewarding to see my work featured on platforms like the BBC and TechCabal, and I’ve even had the honour of speaking as a panelist at the just concluded African Union’s Skills Week held in Accra, Ghana."

"I strongly believe that using technology will greatly help to close educational gaps, especially among people in the hard-to-reach communities across Africa."

"Nigeria needs to take more proactive measures to position itself for prosperity within the digital economy, we must also emphasize the promotion of basic digital skills among those on the other side of the digital divide.” — on bridging the tech skills gap in Nigeria"

"“I was enjoying teaching but curiosity pulled me deeper into tech and AI and today I still teach not just students but teachers and business owners because there’s no limit to what you can be or achieve.” on his journey from classroom teacher to tech educator"

"A video blogger would be someone who maintains a blog and puts video on it that they create."

"In much the same way that a newspaper is a medium for someone who writes for The New York Times."

"A blog is a different medium source, an electronic medium where you control what goes on there without an editor or an organization that has to pay for the infrastructure to get that word out there."

"My point of view is probably that there's a lot of people expressing civil dissent right now."

"The mainstream media, the established media, doesn't always do the best job or the most comprehensive work in explaining why they're out there and what they're doing."

"The title of my blog is The Revolution Will Be Televised."

"Several factors inspired me to found WAAW Foundation in 2007 while I was completing my Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering at Texas A & M University. At that time, I was the only woman of color in the program and my graduate education experience had been a very lonely one working mostly amongst men. I knew that I wanted to be an engineer and had the ability to be a great one, but I wished there were more women in STEM to support each other."

"I saw the huge impact technology could have in lifting entire communities out of poverty. I could see the rapid technological advances that were in the pipeline. For instance, I saw the advent of Google, PayPal and Amazon and some of my research was around the technologies that powered these huge companies and the impact they had on e-commerce, telecommunications, and the financial industry."

"In Nigeria, we have continued to engage with the community to push against societal norms that tell girls that a STEM education is not feminine. We have worked with government ministries, secondary school teachers, communities and especially parents of girls to educate them on the huge benefits of STEM education for girls. WAAW is looking to partner with Federal Ministries of Education, Science and Technology to re-invent what STEM education should be and retrain our teachers to incorporate hands on, locally available resources to promote innovation in the classrooms."

"Consider the recent research that states that 90% of jobs created in the next 20-30 years will require some sort of skill in STEM. That means that people who have STEM skills will have a huge advantage over those who don’t. Whether they are applying those skills in core technology or in healthcare, finance, agriculture, business, transportation. I think that girls should participate in creating those technologies so we can solve some of the critical issues facing us."

"I have never met a great leader who is not a reader."

"“If we have more space, in a government school or a university to make use of their spaces and their classrooms, we can do much more and accommodate so much more girls.”"

"We need to educate and sensitize people more. Sometimes when we talk about our programme, many people are yet to really understand the importance of educating girls, they say why only girls, why is this different from any other organisation."

"Trust your instincts, if you feel a person, product or approach is not right for your business, trust your instincts even more and do what is right for your business. Be unafraid."

"“I wanted to be that voice, I wanted to go back to my community and inspire more girls to consider tech as a career path.”"

"What we have done is to start to showcase women in tech as cool and successful, [and we have started to] engage girls at a younger age … and show girls that tech is really fun."

"I used to back off from reaching my dreams because I used to think that I was too little, too small, too that. Now I realize that I’m doing others a disservice. The more I reach for my dreams, the more successful I am. The more I share my story, the more I empower other people to reach for their dreams. We should all do that because each of our dreams is valid.”"

"Health is a journey. I would love to see a world where the first place of living healthy is going to Mother Earth and nature to look at what nature has given us to stay healthy.”"

"The telecoms sector saw an initial spike in activity when everyone shifted to online activities due to the lockdown, but growth has plateaued more recently. With the help of the government, industry players were able to ensure rights of passage and keep networks running despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic."

"Network congestion has become the norm this year, but there have been no network outages. Although many people and strategic sectors have struggled because they were not prepared for a crisis like Covid-19, telecoms companies have benefitted strongly. Nonetheless, the longer the lockdowns persist, the greater the impact on consumers’ propensity to spend money and therefore purchase network credit. The third quarter saw growth begin to flatline, and tighter margins are on the horizon, even for the largest companies."

"Online access is still a privilege and not yet a right in the country, as we would like it to become. We are, however, close to being able to offer affordable internet services to customers nationwide. The target of 2% of monthly GNI for 1 GB of data is within reach."

"The Nigerian Broadband Plan 2020-25 is now in place, and the Broadband Implementation Steering Committee seeks to provide solutions for low-income populations. Establishing community networks – whereby low-tech solutions can help to prevent white elephant projects – is another point of consideration. Ultimately, the sector needs to adopt sustainable practices and include local communities in the development strategy. In practice, this means understanding how multilateral organisations that work on a peer-to-peer basis can hand work over to local people who are trained to run projects."

"There is no shortage of investor interest in Nigeria, as shown by large-scale investments in wet data capacity around Lagos. Facebook and Google’s plans ¬–Project Simba and Equiano, respectively – are further evidence that Lagos is on the map. We welcome the arrival of these companies; it opens up competition and keeps traditional players on their toes. However, despite such interest around Lagos, increasing capacity in the hinterlands at an affordable cost remains an issue."

"Virtual learning has been the norm among the affluent since the beginning, and this model is in line with the western mindset that is increasingly prevalent. However, there is still some reluctance to engage with digital skills in the capital. A large part of that reluctance is due to inadequate equipment; some workers did not have a computer to work from home during the pandemic and therefore found it impossible to connect. Furthermore, in the public sector, some information is still stored on paper rather than in digital databases."

"Nigeria remains a 2G mobile landscape, and we are still expanding and reacting. Covid-19 has exposed the hurdles of corruption, infrastructure deficits and other pre-existing problems that we may now find solutions to through digital means. The country has the opportunity to correct some bad habits and think in a different way. Thanks to the pandemic, there is now more discussion on digital topics as governments around the world increasingly appreciate and consider new areas for development."

"Big data, artificial intelligence and data science are all on the table and ready for integration. However, we must move away from our reliance on oil to embrace digitalisation and open up more space online. There has been a spike in cybercrime activity which has, of course, made a bad name for the internet when overall it is a force for good. Nigeria’s journey requires people, processes and systems to build bridges to a more digital world. We now have more pieces to the jigsaw puzzle, we just need to put them together."

"We can build a strong and relevant education and skill development system on the successes and failures of others, without forgetting where we come from and where we hope to go."

"For years now, the theme of “Africa Rising” has continued to resonate amongst intellectual circles focused on our continent. In that time, I’ve felt a growing concern over Africa’s state of development. I wonder what the future holds, and whether we are actually set to “rise.” Our continent’s journey thus far and what lies ahead worries me. How do we lay the path to a brighter narrative for our future generations?"

"Let’s bring this closer to home. Nigeria’s population hovers around 190 million, and is expected to near 400 million by 2050. This is equivalent to combining the current populations of Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Sweden. I am worried about now, and I am terrified for the future."

"The Medium post on “The Education System Africa Needs” by Femi Longe struck a chord. Femi calls for a total overhaul of our current colonial education systems, which are insufficient for producing a skilled workforce required to support the growing population. The challenges we must overcome for Africa to rise are equally matched by deficiencies in human capital. So, what can we do to surmount these challenges?"

"AI people find it remarkably difficult to conceptualize alternatives to their existing repertoire of technical schemata. The idea that human beings do not conduct their lives by means of planning, for example, is just short of unintelligible."

"AI…consists precisely in the deployment of… technical schemata to translate, or gloss, selected features of a given domain in terms that can also be interpreted as the operation of a computer program. The vagueness of AI vocabulary is instrumental."

"A strong education system is the cornerstone of any country’s growth and prosperity. The current system we inherited and maintained simply doesn’t cut it. I admire Femi’s emphasis on the need for Africa to identify its goals and gear our education system towards those goals. While I agree that we should be guided by our own aspirations and cultures, I also believe that the best way forward is to learn from and build on the successes and failures of other education systems with our own goals in mind. A complete overhaul of any education system is a daunting and multi-faceted (and expensive) task. Particularly when it involves overhauling the entire curriculum, producing millions of teachers or facilitators, re-orienting mindsets, and potentially building thousands of facilities. This can feel intimidating. But there is hope."

"Luckily, we live in a time when alternative models of education and skill development are being created at an accelerated pace around the world. This means that the next generation of Nigerians (and Africans) can leapfrog and create and experience new models of learning. A handful of innovators have built and continue to refine what they believe Africa needs for the next generation: context-based learning and skill development opportunities with pragmatic outcomes linked to the market."

"At Andela, we aim to empower globally relevant builders of the future Nigeria (and Kenya, and soon other countries in Africa). Our developers hone their technical and leadership skills by working as distributed global team members of our company partners. We hope these individuals become the bureaucrats, administrators, builders, founders, and employers who have all gone through a bespoke learning experience built for purpose. What purpose? To lay the foundation for Africa’s technological evolution through technology capacity development."

"This is my call to action for my fellow Africans: join the movement. Find a field or industry you are passionate about, and build a scalable platform for developing human capacity in that field. If we can sidestep our education system and build new models that can scale massively, maybe… just maybe we can empower our people to reach their full potential and watch Africa rise."

"The whole goal is, of course, to provide the capabilities to be able to train very, very large, accurate models. If you look at the current landscape of computing capabilities, mostly dominated by GPUs, what you need is many, many GPUs because of the limited amount of memory that each of the GPUs can have."

"What SambaNova brings to the table is the ability one or two or a quarter rack of capability to be able to provide terabytes of memory. And so that allows you to build huge models that can serve any of the particular industrial verticals or commercial verticals that are of interest."

"For instance, huge natural language processing models for the financial sector or for developing chatbots and customer services, voice-based commerce. Also, natural language processing, finds use in cancer research also."

"Or huge vision models that we call true resolution that allow you to do medical images without reducing the resolution to make the image more blurry, so that you can fit it into the memory requirements of conventional systems."

"And again, you want to be able to handle those large embedding tables because the larger the embedding table, the more accurate the model, the better recommendation you’re able to give."

"And so what you want is the capability to both do large batch training very efficiently, but also to single-batch inference very efficiently. And so we can do that with the SambaNova systems."