Tapping the potentials of the Internet:
The 14J initiative

promote it. Even as other countries of the world were busy embracing the new magic called the Internet, connecting their people, Nigeria was still in the dark over what the Internet was all about. The Internet was under-utilised.
Today however, with the efforts of a group like the Nigeria Internet Group (NIG), the situation has improved and there is greater awareness about the Internet in the country. Yet, opportunities provided by the wave-making technology as enormous as they are, appear untapped by Nigerians.
Mid July, the non-governmental organisation brought stakeholders in the ICT sector together to unveil the opportunities that abound in the market using the Internet; it was christened Internet for Jobs (I4J) initiative.
Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Engr. Ernest Ndukwe at the occasion warned that it could be suicidal if private and public concerns in Nigeria failed to explore opportunities brought about by modern technologies like the Internet which he said has been empowering users and creating new business models.
Presenting a paper tagged “Promoting Internet-based businesses in Nigeria”; Ndukwe noted that because the Internet today represents an exciting new frontier abundant with opportunities, Nigeria couldn't afford to explore the opportunities in order to remain relevant in today's global economy. “More communications now take place via the Internet than over the telephone or other media.”
Arguing that the Internet has had tremendous impact on national economies, the NCC chief executive officer cited the United States of America as an example of where 50% more mails are delivered in one day than the US Post.
Ndukwe maintained that the reality of the digital divide is staring everybody in the face citing the disparity in access to computers and Internet among developed and developing nations as a case study. Technology according to him is driving the new economy but expressed sadness that everybody was not benefiting from this development.
“There is a growing split or digital divide, which breaks down along national, economic, educational and geographic lines; between the information haves and have-nots”, Ndukwe said.
The EVC observed that people, businesses and communities without ready access to the Internet are being left behind in the world's fast growing economy adding that the implication was staggering. “International investors demand quick access to information and new businesses will not locate in places where access is not readily and speedily available.”
While speaking on the importance of the Internet, he noted that communities that lack high speed, inexpensive Internet access will not attract the right level of commerce required to develop their economies as a result will continue to see a decline in economic prosperity.
Ndukwe noted that it is now obvious that the new world order is driven by ICT. “Only those countries, which implement the required communications infrastructure, will continue to define culture and information transfer as well as dominate political and societal views on issues and events.”
He said it was because of the realization of the enormous benefits of Internet that the NCC has adopted high- handed regulation of the Internet so as not to limit its deployment, spread and usage.
In his words: “In Nigeria, networks to enhance Internet access are being expanded rapidly to take advantage of the huge potentials of ICT resources such as the Internet. NCC's primary concern today remains that of facilitating rapid expansion of the much needed ICT infrastructure to facilitate economic growth and development.”
Ndukwe was of the opinion that the Internet could be harnessed to provide employment and grow new businesses for a country endowed with large population of smart and educated young people. He insisted that the Internet has the potential of empowering young entrepreneurs.
He advised that Nigeria should be selling to the world and, not just remain a passive recipient of goods, services, technology and ideas maintaining that the Internet makes this possible.
“The success of innovations like Google, Facebook and Yahoo ought to inspire many of our young people to innovate, create and dare. While as professionals in the public and private sectors it is indeed our duty and social responsibility to empower the youth in every way possible”, Ndukwe pleaded.
Earlier in his welcome address at the event, President of the Nigeria Internet Group (NIG), Engr. Lanre Ajayi said the objective of the I4J initiative was to demonstrate the enormous potential of the Internet as a platform for creating jobs.
“Our aspiration is to make Nigeria a preferred destination for the global Internet related services including outsourcing, web application development, e-commerce and software development thereby creating job opportunities for our people”.
He stated that the NIG under his leadership had equally set the pace on issues germane to the growth of the ICT in Nigeria recalling that in 2006, the group organized a seminar on the Unified License regime to prepare stakeholders and operators in the industry on the challenges and opportunities ahead of them with the emergence of the era.
“The event no doubt was the needed tonic for the rollout of the Unified License scheme by the operators licensed by Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC. Universal Service Regime has come to stay as one of the fulcrum of ICT services in Nigeria”.
Engr. Ajayi remarked that in line with the group's desire to give the Nigerian youth the much needed leap in the Information Technology world and generate their interest in the sector; it has opened NIG school chapters in some Nigerian tertiary institutions including the one inaugurated at the Federal University of Technology, Akure.
He described the Internet for Jobs initiative as an attempt by NIG to build “on our successful effort to promote Internet access in Nigeria. With a reasonable level of Internet connectivity in Nigeria, there is now a need to develop local Internet content and to use the Internet as a platform to create jobs for our people.”
To achieve this goal he said, the NIG intends to use the I4J initiative to facilitate start up of online businesses in Nigeria with the aim of generating job opportunities for Nigerians adding that the group intends partnering with government agencies, international organizations, corporate companies and individuals to join it in realizing this initiative.

small but grow big within a short space of time will be established in the country. “In not too distant future, we should begin to see Nigerian online companies in the mood of Yahoo, Amazon, Google, eBay that will be addressing local problems and even take on the world by providing global services.”
Ajayi noted that in accomplishing the set objectives of the I4J initiative, the following steps would be taken: Call for proposals, review of proposals, award of grants, identification and selection of support companies as well as entering into partnership with a number of organizations.
He expressed gratitude to agencies like the NCC and NITDA and pledged closer working relationship with other agencies like the USPF, the CPN and other related agencies.
Managing Director of Raisingwealth Inc., Olakitan Wellington in her paper, “Strategic marketing: A success factor for e-business” noted there is a lot of legitimate money to be made on the Internet adding that the market potential is enormous as the Internet business in Nigeria is an emerging phenomenon.
“It is a business you can start profiting from almost immediately and you will never be out of job or contracts. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there is huge potential to make money on the Internet.”
Wellington said it takes a lot of tactics, strategies and hard work to succeed in Internet business. “A lot of these people who come to the internet to 'seek their own green pastures' do not see the internet as a business that will make them money, they see it as an opportunity to make money. We call them 'opportunity seekers'.”
The I4J initiative no doubt, will open the window of opportunities for Nigerians who would want to do genuine business via the Internet. It is hoped that the objectives of this initiative would be fully actualized.

Chief executive officer of Nigeria Jobs Online, Shola Ajani, in this interview talks about how his website has become a meeting point for employers of labour and employees and the positive exposition his recruitment website has done for Nigeria. He spoke to ROMMY IMAH and SOLA OGUNSANLU….

process of preparing for that piece of work, we searched the possibility of achieving that via online recruitment
and it was quite surprising then that there was practically the absence of any online platform to recruit and that was practically how we saw the opportunity.

What actually is your brief?

Nigeria Jobs Online dot com is a platform for employers to advertise and recruit candidates. In a nutshell, that's what we do. It's a platform that brings the employers and the candidates together. Employers looking for candidates can place their vacancies, their adverts on our website as well as candidates that are looking for work can come to our website and apply for work online.
One of the key features that we have on our website is the ability of candidates to post their CVs online. We keep an existing database of candidates who are looking for work. So, if an employer posts a vacancy online now, not only can he expect to get responses from people; he can also access their existing database to look for qualified candidates.

But the strategy is that if your advert goes online today, you will get responses today.
It is unlike the newspaper where if you place an advert today, you have to wait for people to respond to your advert. With online, you don't have to do that. We have two opportunities if you like for people who will see the advert and respond, and from the database on the system.

How do you intend creating awareness here considering the poor level of Internet penetration in the country?

Well, among the corporate world, one of the things we did that created awareness about our site was the exhibition itself. That increased our clientele base other than just writing to them and saying this is a website, this is a platform to advertise. We found out that one of our brands gave us more prominence and basically enlightened us. And the other thing again is this; if you run occasional advert in the newspaper, I mean there are established newspapers in recruitment so what would we do if we want our advert?

How come you are holding an exhibition in London other than Nigeria?

One thing we heard about the Internet is that it is beyond barriers. Globalization has virtually changed everything.There was a time we all complained about brain drain in Nigeria but look at it, brain drain has its main advantage in the sense that people go out , acquire skills and they want to come back to improve and all that.
What I found out is that Internet has broken down the hitherto existing traditional barriers. People can transact business without physically having to move. So, to restrict ourselves and say look we are going to serve solely the Nigerian market when we have an online community, we are restricting our ability because we can provide services beyond here effectively.
Our tool exposes our services beyond Nigeria and so, we can't stop that. I mean, we place advert and we get responses from all over the place, Asia, America, everywhere. So, the tools in effect define the way we work, we can't restrict our boundary.
How do you cope with the country's bad image created by cyber crime perpetrators?
It works both ways; in terms of pedigree, I look at my background, I studied and trained in England for over 15years and I am not about to come to Nigeria and compromise that standard in terms of the quality of service we offer.
In England, as a recruitment agency, you are not supposed to charge a candidate. There is a law that says you shouldn't charge a candidate; but there is no such law in Nigeria. As a rule in this company, we don't charge candidates even though there are quite a few companies out there who will charge candidates, and rightly so.
They have the right to charge candidates but most people have the impression that if you are an employment agency, a recruiting company in Nigeria and you want to charge candidates, you could be a 419er. But I tell you that they have the right to charge because of the cost of running business in Nigeria. Of course you know there are people who charge without existing vacancies; for us, we don't charge.
The other thing we do again is the kind of service we offer our companies. We tell them this is what we do; it is our service level agreement that this is what we do and so far, we've been able to deliver on that. We don't compromise the standard in terms of quality control; we don't compromise the standard to ensure that we give our clients very good service that can meet their expectation.
Therefore, in getting into any commercial arrangement with a client, these are the things we will deliver and you can hold on to what we say we will deliver. By that, it would have enabled us to create a brand or create a pedigree.

Our parent company itself is called Maximise Potentials. Maximise Potentials does other things like consulting, training, personnel development and then recruitment. The website is a tool to achieve the goals of that subsidiary- Maximise Potentials. But in going along, we realized that we have got to register it as a brand in its own name because it has established itself in its own functionality.

In what way do you maintain the standard?

Jobs In Nigeria Exhibition (JINE) has become a living brand and that is what is sustaining the business this long. Originally, the concept is to have corporate advertisers hook on to the online; that is a very new thing in Nigeria. People were used to placing their adverts only in the newspapers, and you know the disadvantages are so many. So far, that's the main channel people use in advertising their products.
If you advertise your vacancies online, you get instant response. If you advertise on newspaper, anybody will apply whether qualified or unqualified; so you have a mountain of people responding to your vacancy. But we have on our site an automatic matching system that sorts out only those that are qualified and meet the criteria. You only get responses from the people that fit your criteria.

What is the level of patronage by Nigerians?

We have about 15,000 registered applicants on different categories. When I say 15,000, I don't mean that all of them are seeking for fresh jobs. Some of them are career changers, those looking for greener pasture. We have graduates, we have middle management, and we have senior management who are registered in our web site.
Over the last three years, we've carried about a thousand vacancies yet we could have a lot more than that. After all, there are some recruitment agencies that carry close to 200,000 vacancies at any given time. There is a company in South Africa called Carrier Junction that carry not less than 15,000 vacancies at any given time. That is where we want to be as far as Nigeria Jobs Online is concerned.
There is a gap in the market now; there is no clear leader in online advertising in Nigeria and no clear brand name. So any company that thinks about advertising online, we want such company to think about Nigeria Jobs Online. That's where we want to be.

How do you sustain the business?

When we set up Nigeria Jobs Online two years ago, we had a long term planning; it was not something to be achieved overnight. I have come to realize that if you are essentially in business to make money, you may lack the right motivation. What I have come to learn is that after you have mapped out your strategic objective then money will follow. When we started, we gave ourself a 5-year plan and within this period, we hope to be the leading brand in online recruitment advertising in Nigeria. We are not yet there but we are working on it.
On how we sustain ourself, one platform to recruit is through the website. We still do physical recruitment whereby a company comes and say I am looking for this or that. And then, we go through the process, we go through our database; we call up candidates to interview them then we send them to the company. The company pays us for that service and that is why we do not charge candidates.
So we still do the traditional recruitment using the web site as our tool. Remember I said we have about 15,000 applicants online. That means that if somebody calls me and says he is looking for an engineer, I could get him ten people within ten minutes based on what we have in our data.

What are the challenges that you face?

One of the first challenges that we faced was the issue of trust. I had two people who came to me and said they saw my business card and asked whether we are real. People tend to be skeptical about anything online. That is why we are quite clear in terms of our financial transactions with our users that we do not charge nor collect any fee. We make this abundantly as clear as possible. So one of the big challenges that we had was that of credibility. But by and large, if you look at the caliber of companies that we have now, I think we've scaled that hurdle. We have the UBAs of this world, Diamond Bank etc.

Can we know the number of companies that you recruit for now?

I do not have the number on my head now. But in a year we work with close to 30 companies including those that advertise online. Our objective is that every day we make sure we get a new client. One thing I realized in business is that if you have a pattern that you are noted for and you have a good track record, people speak to themselves. You send them a proposal and quote one or two companies, what they will simply do is call up one of their colleagues in that company and once he confirms it, you get the job. We have realized this that is why we manage our relationship very well so that we can do our business.

What is the future of the company?

We want to position ourself as the leading online recruitment advertising web site in Nigeria. Again, for Nigerians out there and companies looking to recruit Nigerians we want to position ourself as the leading brand so that any company that wants to recruit professional Nigerians from abroad, would think about us. But the truth is that as far as recruiting from abroad is concerned, we have become a brand in that area. We have exhibitions all over the world; we are going to have in Nigeria, in U.K and the U.S. As far as getting people to come back using our platform, we are a leader in that respect. Right now, we do not have any local competitor; our competitors are based in the UK but then, they focus on Africa while we focus essentially on Nigeria because it has the greatest market in Africa.

How many Nigerians have you recruited for companies?

Our first exhibition, which we had in 2006, we had 10 companies that attended and among them about 100 people were recruited. In 2007, which was the one that took place in April in U.K, we had 15 companies. About 1500 people turned up and we had about 500 recruitments. Apart from the exhibition, we do assessment centers in UK whereby we just take few companies to UK and do executive tests, interviews and so on. So the exhibition platform, the international recruitment and all of that since we started, has recruited close to a thousand Nigerians mainly for the banks, Oil and Gas industry. I think the major achievement we've recorded is being able to bring Nigerians from abroad to work here.

Broadband users in 30 of the world's most developed countries are getting greatly differing speeds and prices, according to a report.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report says 60 per cent of its member countries net users are now on broadband. The report said countries that had switched to fibre networks had the best speeds at the lowest prices.
In Japan net users have 100Mbps lines, 10 times higher than the OECD average. Japan's price for broadband per megabit per second is the lowest in the OECD at $0.22 (11p), said the report. The most expensive is Turkey at $81.13 (£40.56).
In the US, the cheapest megabit per second broadband connection is $3.18 (£1.59) while in the UK it is $3.62 (£1.81). Subscribers to Japan's fibre networks can also upload at the same speed they can download, which is not possible with ADSL (broadband over a telephone line) and most cable subscriptions.
Sweden, Korea and Finland also offer 100Mbps net connections, as all four countries have switched to fibre optic networks. The OECD represents 30 of the leading democratic economies, from Australia to the US, France to Japan.
"Broadband is very quickly becoming the basic medium for service delivery on both fixed and wireless networks," said the report.
Jupiter Research telecoms analyst Ian Fogg said: "It's very hard to draw comparisons across 30 countries globally because there are different trends happening in each of them; the entry price for broadband was an incredibly important criterion to compare. Because the market is very fragmented consumers care about cheap prices."
According to the report, broadband prices for DSL connections across the 30 countries have fallen by 19% and increased in speed by 29% in the year to October 2006. Cable prices and speeds followed a similar trend.
The least expensive monthly subscription for always-on broadband was in Sweden, where $10.79 (£5.40) per month bought a 256kbps connection. The country with the most expensive entry point for broadband access was Mexico, where it cost $52.36 (£26.18) per month for 1mbps.

The management of Linkserve Limited has announced an upgrade in bandwidth of its KU- Band meaning that all her customers will now enjoy a free 20 per cent increase in bandwidth capacity.
A statement from the company said this additional capacity comes with a very generous connection for VOIP calls and all the services provided by the company in addition to allowing the customer to make local and international calls as well as browse the Internet at the same time.
Head, Corporate Affairs and Marketing Development, Mrs. Clementine Ibekwe, noted in a circular to the ISP's customers that the increased capacity is being given at no extra cost to them as it was the company's way of appreciating their loyalty and patronage in ten years of Linkserve's existence.
“Linkserve Limited today reaffirms her commitment to providing the best services possible to you at all times,” the statement quoted Ibekwe as saying.
Meanwhile, as part of her continuous belief and participation in youth growth and education in information technology, the company has held two-weekend training for the Orogbum Youth Council of the Orogbum community in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
The theme of the training, which was on VSAT Systems Installation comprised of both the theoretical and practical aspects of VSAT installations, and was also accompanied with free handouts and manuals for the students.
Senior Operations Officer of the company's Port Harcourt office, Mrs. Jessica Omohefe, said the training was a measure by Linkserve Limited to appreciate the community having been the host community of the company's Port Harcourt branch location.
She added that for the past eight years, Linkserve Limited opened for operations, there has not been any form of threats on the company facilities and operations. “They truly deserve this and more,” she said.
The Orogbum Youths council's Secretary and Public Relations Officer, Messrs Izim Sunny and Uche Ali respectively expressed their appreciation to Linkserve Limited for the privilege and opportunity given them to gain such knowledge.
They urged other organizations to emulate the Linkserve example of empowering and making the youth relevant the youth.