BD Insider 82nd: the gender digital divide, the Nigeria Startup Bill, Digital Quality of Life ranking

This is a blog copy of the 82nd version of our weekly newsletter, BD Insider. Subscribers get to read it first and can take action based on it.

Hello Insider,
Welcome to the 82nd issue.

It’s the International Day of the Girl Child! Nine years ago, on October 11, 2012, the first day of the Girl Child was celebrated, as declared by the United Nations (UN). For an industry plagued by such a huge gender divide, it makes sense to observe this day as a way to celebrate the diversity of female trailblazers and show every girl what’s possible.

“The gender digital divide...is real. It is an inequity and exclusion gap across geographies and generations that is our challenge to address if the digital revolution is to be for all, with all, by all”, says the UN. In commemoration of this day, we curated a list of tech communities for girls in Africa. We encourage every well-meaning, responsible organization to play its part in addressing this digital gender divide.

The last quarter of the year is off to a bang as tech giant Google announced plans and funding for African internet consumers, founders and startups.

For today’s recap of stories from the previous week, we will be looking at:

• How the proposed startup bill can drive growth for Nigeria’s tech ecosystem
• Our takeaways from the 2021 Digital Quality of Life research
• MEST and Mastercard Foundation’s partnership to accelerate SMEs in Ghana
• Tech Word for the Week: Peer-to-peer Network

As usual, we also have sections for fundraising announcements, Tech word of the week, job opportunities, and other interesting things we came across. Let’s get right into it!

💡What will the Nigeria Startup Bill achieve?

The Nigeria Startup Bill (NSB) project is said to be a joint initiative by Nigeria’s tech startup ecosystem and the Presidency to harness the potential of the nation’s digital economy through co-created regulations.

In an exclusive interview with Tomiwa Aladekomo, the CEO of Big Cabal Media and Member of the Presidential Advisory Strategic Group for the development of the bill, Tomiwa shared insights with us on how the bill intends to solve the challenges of political interference, lack of infrastructure, and regulatory complexities in the ecosystem.

Get the full story here

🔍Takeaways from the 2021 Digital Quality of Life research

In September, Surfshark --- a VPN service company based in the British Virgin Islands released the third edition of its Digital Quality of Life (DQL) research.

It covers 90% of the global population and indexes 110 countries by looking at five fundamental pillars of digital life – internet affordability, internet quality, e-infrastructure, e-security, and e-government.

According to the research, Nigeria lacks internet affordability and also has one of the worst e-governments in the world. However, Nigeria’s e-security is slightly higher than the global average.

More insights from the research are here.

🚺 MEST and Mastercard Foundation to accelerate SMEs in Ghana.

MEST Africa and Mastercard Foundation will provide Ghanaian SMEs with hands-on and strategic guidance on how to manage challenges that come with systematic barriers while building operational and technical efficiencies that will boost their growth.

About 85% of businesses in Ghana are SMEs, this identifies its contribution to socio-economic prosperity in the country, this program intends to supercharge the efforts of these enterprises and enable increased revenue, optimized chain linkages, employment amongst other economic benefits.

How to participate? Sign up here

✍🏿Tech Word for the Week - Peer to Peer Network

You’ve seen this P2P on your social media timeline, yeah?

Peer to Peer refers to a distributed network where each system both stores and transfers data without a central server. The network is easy to maintain because each peer on the network is independent of one another. However, it's difficult to secure the complete network because each node is independent.

This week, Dara explores everything you need to know about this term.

💰 Fundraising

In 2021 alone, African startups raised more than $1.1 billion combined,  this is more than what was raised in previous years. Here are some of the recent startup fundraises across Africa that you should be aware of:

• Payday secured $1 million pre-seed fund to build the "Paypal for Africa"
• Klasha secured $2.4 million seed funding to build technology infrastructure for cross-border commerce in Africa.
• Bitmama raised $350,000 pre-seed funding to expand product offerings
• Moroccan B2B e-commerce startup Chari raised a $5m seed round for expansion

Tip: If you're looking to improve your take-home (salary) by moving jobs, companies that have just raised are a great place to apply. Companies almost always hire after a significant raise.

🔍 Things we found interesting.

Here are some of the most exciting stories we've written and read over the last seven days:

• David Adeleke’s deep dive into how to think about the creator economy in Africa. Monetization is still a big issue, but that’s just one of the challenges African’s face when trying to participate in the Creator economy. Dig deep.
• Software Engineer at Microsoft, Adora Nwodo writes a book on cloud engineering for newbies
• Nigerian startup founders make up 52% of startups that received financial support from Google’s Black Founders Fund for Africa
• Web 3.0 promises to make computers understand data in the way humans do. What?!

💼 Job Opportunities

You might get the job! Look up some of these roles. If need be, upskill to meet the description of subsequent openings:

• Eden Life is hiring a Senior Product Manager (Lagos, Nigeria)
• uLesson is hiring Content Marketing Intern (Abuja, Nigeria)
• mPharma is hiring Head of Global Marketing (Accra, Ghana)
• uLesson is hiring Inside Sales Specialist (Abuja, Nigeria)
• Twitter is hiring Social Media Marketing Lead (Ghana)
• Glovo is hiring Head of Growth (Lagos, Nigeria)

Thanks for reading

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Meanwhile, do something nice for a girl this week.
Bye for now,
Johnstone