TechCabal Daily – Facebook’s dominance in Africa could be at risk

Despite its investment in fighting fake news, more than half of young Africans do not regard Facebook as a trustworthy source of news. This is according to a poll by the African Youth Survey conducted by a global polling firm, PSB Research and paid for by the Ichikowitz Family Foundation.

The poll conducted 4,200 interviews with young Africans aged between 18 and 24 across 14 sub-Saharan African countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

Half of the respondents for the survey also considered WhatsApp as untrustworthy for news. Google on the other hand was viewed more favorably by the respondents. Only about 2 out of 10 respondents considered Google untrustworthy as a news source.

Facebook is the leading social media platform in Africa. It has more than 139 million users visiting Facebook.com every month and WhatsApp is the leading chat
platform on the continent.

Unless its anti-fake news initiatives begin to yield some results, Facebook is at risk of losing momentum in Africa where the majority of the population are young people. The fake news perception could cause young audiences to lose trust in it completely and consequently begin to use the platform less often.

Within the space of one week, two Nigerian banks have been hacked.

Unity Bank was hacked on August 25 while Access Bank was hacked on August 31. Both banks have denied that the breaches but hackers shared customer data online thereby increasing concerns about customer privacy.

These incidents come amidst an increase in the number of data breaches. In a recent case, the NIMC MobileID app was supposed to allow Nigerians view their National Identity information. But the app didn’t work properly as it displayed wrong identity details, exposing senstive data about other
users.

Abubakar explores these data breaches and what they mean for consumers in this TechCabal article.

Bank of Kigali has announced Nigerian entrepreneur, Obinna Ukwuani as its Chief Digital Officer. Ukwuani commenced work in June and is replacing Regis Rugemanshuro who was appointed to head the Rwanda Social Security Board in February.

Ukwuani previously worked with Paystack in an operations & product capacity. He is well known in the Nigerian tech industry for his technical skills accelerator, NESA by Makers.

Since issuing draft guidelines for the regulation and licensing of payment service banks (PSB) in 2018, Nigeria has only issued the license to 3 entities. The entities include 9PSB, a unit of telco 9Mobile. MTN, on the other hand, is awaiting approval for the license.

This week, the country’s central bank says it will issue more licenses but insists that the capital requirement for the license is $13 million. Additionally, telcos, banks, and retail chains interested in the license must register a different entity to get one.

It’s unclear why there’s not being swift progress with the PSBs. For one, the capital and legal requirements could be obstacles for organizations looking to provide mobile money
services.