Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei says it wants to train up to 3 million African youths to work with cutting-edge digital technology such as artificial intelligence. Already, Nigerian students who took part in a Huawei-sponsored information and communications technology (ICT) competition say the benefits, including possible job placements with the company, are enormous. But experts warn there could be potential negative impacts of China’s growing tech influence in Africa. Computer engineering finalist Muhammad Maihaja is set to graduate from the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria’s Kaduna state in November. In 2019, he was part of a team of six from the school who represented Nigeria at the global Huawei ICT competition in Shenzhen, China, where they finished in third place. Huawei introduced the competition to Africa in 2014 to identify and nurture highly skilled ICT professionals — what the company says is part of its expanding talent search in Africa’s tech sector that has benefited some 2,000 African students like Maihaja. “We have been exposed to devices and technologies we’ve never experienced before. As normal university students, we would not have experienced what we did experience in the competition. So, I’ll say … this has made me much more ICT inclined, so to say,” Maihaja said.The competition evaluates students’ competence in network and cloud technology. Maihaja and his team’s success in 2019 was a rare achievement for an African team, let alone a first-time participant. The feat inspired many other students like Hamza Atabor who tried out for the next edition in 2020. He and the other Nigerian students this time won the competition. “I was inspired by, you know, when they talked about their stories, how they won the competition, and also when they were given their prizes and everything. I just felt, OK, this is something to actually make a sacrifice for,” Atabor said.Students like Maihaja and Atabor are meeting Huawei’s set objective, but critics say the company is only a fragment of China’s fast-paced dominance in Africa’s technology landscape. Huawei reportedly accounts for more than 70% of the continent’s telecommunications network. Mohammed Bashir Muazu, a professor of computer engineering at Ahmadu Bello University, says it’s no surprise China is gaining traction in Africa. “Seeing the level of technological developments in China, I think what is actually happening is inevitable,” Muazu said. Concerns about China’s presence in Africa grew in 2019 after U.S. newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, reported that Huawei had helped Ugandan and Zambian authorities spy on political opponents. Huawei denied the accusations and declined an interview on the matter. But ICT expert Samuel Adekola says China could use its competitive advantage for selfish gains. “It’s really dangerous. I cannot quantify how much they could do, but whoever has data, you can do a lot of things. You have a lot of information about a group of people, the nation,” Adekola said.As long as China continues to invest in Africa, students like Maihaja and Atabor will learn valuable skills, even though experts say Africa may have to pay a price for relying too heavily on foreign companies.
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Month: September 2021
Social media giant Facebook will invest $1.5 million in Argentine media to train journalists and promote online development, a first in Latin America.The agreement signed last week with almost 150 media outlets will allow 3,000 journalists to be trained, while also helping Facebook develop commercial agreements.It’s part of the Facebook Journalism Project that involves collaboration with media all over the world.The three-year Argentine investment aims “to support almost 150 media of every size and region in the country,” Julieta Shamma, Facebook’s head of strategic media partnerships in Latin America, told AFP.The agreement involves commercial commitments with around 30 Argentine outlets including Clarin, La Nacion, Pagina12 and Infobae to attract more links to the Facebook platform.”We’re collaborating with media to try different forms of helping people find news on Facebook and connect with them,” Shamma said.Facebook will offer training in themes such as product development, format experimentation and using statistics, among others.”We believe the digital transformation will create new opportunities for the news ecosystem, offering different possibilities to expand the audience through social and interactive formats, and to monetize content,” Shamma said.Facebook has already invested $600 million worldwide since 2018 to support digital development in the news industry. The Silicon Valley-based company plans to invest another $1 billion in the next three years.
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The United Nations Environment Program on Monday marked the official end of toxic leaded gasoline use in vehicles worldwide. A company in Nairobi, where the UNEP is headquartered, is working on the next step — converting all buses and utility vehicles to electric power by 2030. Lenny Ruvaga has the story.
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After suspending the use of 1.63 million doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine over contamination concerns last week, Japan is now recalling those doses, Moderna Inc. and its Japanese partner, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. said Wednesday.Last week, some vials of the vaccine were found to be contaminated with stainless steel.Japanese officials said Wednesday that they did not think the stainless steel particles posed a health risk, while Moderna said the contamination was probably caused by pieces of metal rubbing together in the machinery that puts stops on the vials.”Stainless steel is routinely used in heart valves, joint replacements and metal sutures and staples. As such, it is not expected that injection of the particles identified in these lots in Japan would result in increased medical risk,” Takeda and Moderna said in a joint statement.According to Taro Kono, the Japanese minister overseeing vaccinations, around 500,000 people received shots from the suspended Moderna batches.The focus on the contaminated doses was heightened after two men died within days of receiving second doses from the contaminated batches.While their deaths are still being investigated, Moderna and Takeda said there was no evidence the vaccine played a role in their deaths.”The relationship is currently considered to be coincidental,” the companies said in the statement.(Some information in this report comes from Reuters.)
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A new report released Wednesday by the United Nations indicates extreme weather events have increased fivefold over the past 50 years, while the number of fatalities related to those events has dropped.Officials from the U.N.’s weather and climate agency, the World Meteorological Organization, introduced the report during a briefing from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. The report shows weather-related disasters have occurred on average at a rate of one per day over the past five decades, killing 115 people and causing $202 million in losses daily.Mami Mizutori, U.N. special representative for disaster risk reduction, told reporters she found the report “quite alarming.” She noted that this past July was the hottest July on record, marked by heat waves and floods around the world. The study shows that more people are suffering due to this increased frequency and intensity of weather events.Mizutori said 31 million people were displaced by natural disasters last year, almost surpassing the number displaced by conflicts. She said on average, 26 million people per year are pushed into poverty by extreme weather events. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic is compounding the problem.The U.N. disaster risk specialist said, “We live in this, what we call, the multihazard world, and it demonstrates that we really need to invest more in disaster risk reduction and prevention.”WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said the good news in the report is that during that same period, fatalities related to these disasters dropped by nearly three times, due to early warning systems and improved disaster management.But the study also shows that more than 91% of the deaths that do occur happen in developing or low-income countries, as many do not have the same warning and management systems in place.The WMO officials said the economic losses associated with these disasters will worsen without serious climate change mitigation. Taalas said if the right measures are put in place, the trend could be stopped in the next 40 years. WMO called on the G-20 group of world economic powers to keep their promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
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The World Health Organization has designated a new strain of COVID-19 as a “variant of interest.”The global health agency announced in its weekly bulletin Tuesday that Mu, also known by its scientific designation B.1.621, has been detected in South America and Europe since it was first identified in Colombia in January.The WHO said the Mu variant has several characteristics that make it more resistant to vaccines, but said more studies needed to be conducted to fully understand how it works.The Mu variant is the fifth one designated by the WHO as a variant of interest. Four other variants have been designated as “variants of concern,” including alpha, which has been detected in 193 countries, and the more transmissible delta, which is present in 170 countries and has been linked to the current worldwide surge of new infections.Scientists in South Africa announced earlier this week they have detected a new COVID-19 variant designated C.1.2. The variant has spread across Africa, Asia, Europe and the southern Pacific region of Oceania since it was first spotted in South Africa in May.The variant has not been identified by the WHO as either a variant of interest or variant of concern.Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Tuesday urged Americans who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine to avoid traveling during the upcoming Labor Day holiday weekend due to a surge of new infections and deaths driven by the delta variant. The United States is averaging well over 100,000 new COVID-19 cases per day, with states like Florida, Mississippi and Washington state reporting record levels of new cases and hospitalizations.Meanwhile, two key officials in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine review office are leaving their posts in the coming weeks. Dr. Marion Gruber, the director of the division, is retiring in October, while her deputy, Dr. Philip Krause, will leave the following month. The retirements of Gruber and Krause come at a crucial time for the FDA, which is nearing a decision on whether to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for children under 12 years old and booster shots of the current vaccines already approved for the adult Americans.Wenderson Cerisene, 7, right, and his sister Dorah, 9, wait to get tested for COVID-19, Aug. 31, 2021, in North Miami, Florida. Florida schools are seeing a rise in COVID-19 cases forcing of students and teachers to quarantine.The New York Times reports Gruber and Krause are upset over the Biden administration’s recent announcement that booster shots would be offered for some Americans beginning next month, well before the FDA had time to properly review the data.In Australia, Premier Daniel Andrews of Victoria state says authorities will gradually lift the current coronavirus restrictions once 70 percent of its adult residents have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Victoria and its capital city, Melbourne, have been under a strict lockdown since early August due to an outbreak that began back in June, but Andrews says it is now apparent that it was time to switch to a mass vaccination strategy to bring the outbreak under control.“We were aiming to drive it down and have cases falling, it is now the advice of the experts that that is not possible, so now we have to contain the growth of cases and the speed at which they increase,” Andrews told reporters. He said the state should reach 70 percent vaccination by September 23.Victoria state posted a record 120 new cases on Wednesday, including two deaths. (Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters and AFP.)
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South Korea’s National Assembly approved legislation on Tuesday that bans app store operators such as Google and Apple from forcing developers to use their in-app payment systems. South Korea is reportedly the first country in the world to pass such a bill, which becomes law when it is signed by the president, whose party has backed the legislation. The tech giants have faced widespread criticism over their practice of requiring app developers to use in-app purchasing systems, for which the companies receive commissions of up to 30%. They say the commissions help pay for the cost of maintaining the app markets. The legislation prohibits the app market operators from using their monopolies to require such payment systems, which means they must allow alternative ways to pay. It says the ban is aimed at promoting fairer competition. The bill aims to prevent any retaliation against developers by banning the companies from imposing any unreasonable delay in approving apps. Apple criticized the legislation in a statement Tuesday, saying it will “put users who purchase digital goods from other sources at risk of fraud, undermine their privacy protections, make it difficult to manage their purchases” and make parental controls and other features less effective. “We believe user trust in App Store purchases will decrease as a result of this legislation” and lead to fewer opportunities for Korean app developers, the company said. The legislation also allows South Korean authorities to investigate the operations of app markets to uncover disputes and prevent actions that undermine fair competition. Regulators in Europe, China and some other markets worry about the dominance of Apple, Google and other industry leaders in payments, online advertising and other fields. Chinese regulators have fined some companies for antimonopoly violations, while other governments are wrestling with how best to keep markets competitive. The Korea Internet Corporations Association, an industry lobby group that includes South Korea’s largest internet companies including search and online shopping giant Naver, welcomed the passage of the bill, which it said would create healthier competition and give users a wider variety of content at cheaper prices. Google said it is considering how to comply with the legislation. “Google Play provides far more than payment processing, and our service fee helps keep Android free, giving developers the tools and global platform to access billions of consumers around the world,” it said in a statement. “And just as it costs developers money to build an app, it costs us money to build and maintain an operating system and app store. We’ll reflect on how to comply with this law while maintaining a model that supports a high-quality operating system and app store, and we will share more in the coming weeks,” it said. In the U.S., Apple last week announced that it had agreed to let developers of iPhone apps send emails to users about cheaper ways to pay for digital subscriptions and media. The concession was part of a preliminary settlement of a lawsuit filed on behalf of iPhone app developers in the U.S. It also addresses an issue raised by a federal court judge who is expected to rule soon on a separate case brought by Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite. The judge wondered why Apple couldn’t allow developers of apps like Fortnite to display a range of payment options within their apps. Over the past year, both Google and Apple reduced their in-app commissions from 30% to 15% for developers with less than $1 million in annual revenue — a move covering most of the apps in their respective stores. But the lower commissions don’t help the largest app makers like Epic and Spotify, which have taken their complaints around the world. The European Union’s executive Commission has accused Apple of distorting competition by forcing developers to use its payment system as well as forbidding them from letting users know about cheaper ways to pay for subscriptions that don’t involve going through an app. Dozens of U.S. states filed a lawsuit in July taking aim at Google’s store. Australian regulators, meanwhile, have also said they’re concerned about restrictions on in-app purchases that mean developers “have no choice” but to use Apple and Google’s own payment systems, according to an interim report into the dominance issued in April.
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