Millions of riders, drivers across Africa get Uber's safety toolkit - ITREALMS

ITREALMS:

Millions of riders, drivers and delivery-partners using the Uber app across Europe, Middle East and Africa, now have a new safety toolkit, reports ITREALMS.

With this, Uber says it has doubled down on safety and roll out Safety Toolkit for riders and drivers across 38 countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda; Features to include Safety Centre, Trusted Contacts, Share Trip, emergency assistance button and customisable speed alerts.

ITREALMS also gathered that over the next few weeks, Uber will be rolling out to the millions of riders, drivers and delivery-partners using the app across Europe, Middle East and Africa locations. 

"The toolkit will introduce new innovative features which aim to raise the bar on safety, and increase transparency, accountability and peace of mind for all users," Uber officials told ITREALMS.

Uber equally said that since launched the app it has provided millions of people with technology that allows them to get a ride at the push of a button, track every trip with GPS technology and report any issues 24/7 with a dedicated safety team. With the introduction of new safety features, the company aims to double down on safety and help make the Uber community safer.

Features that will be introduced as part of the new rider and driver safety toolkit, include:

Emergency button - With the push of a button in the app, riders, drivers and delivery-partners can connect directly to private emergency services and security response when needed through a third party private security supplier

Trusted Contacts - Riders can now easily designate five friends or family members as “trusted contacts” and, with a single tap, share their trip information which are easily customisable in their trip sharing preferences.

Safety Centre - A new app-housed safety information hub where users can find information on some of the key existing safety tools in the app, including our 24/7 team, information on the driver and the car, trip GPS-tracking and our rating and feedback system.

Speed alerts - A feature which reminds drivers and delivery partners to maintain a safe speed within the posted speed limits.

These new safety features will be a phased rollout, not all riders, drivers and delivery partners will have access to the features immediately.

“With more than 15 million trips on the Uber app every day, there is nothing more important than the safety of riders, drivers and couriers. Over the last year we’ve been working to develop innovative products that increase transparency, accountability and peace of mind for all users. The rollout of our new Safety Toolkit features across Europe, Middle East and Africa is the next step in making sure that we’re helping everyone stay safe and connected, wherever you might be,” says Sachin Kansal, Uber’s Global Head of Safety Product.

Nenye Dom with agency report/GEE

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Continental shift: Delivering a digital Africa

Opinion@ITRealms:

"Across Africa, the Internet is creating social and economic value, supporting entrepreneurialism and driving innovation, says David Dean. To close the remaining digital divide, he explains what actions policymakers should take to maximise the public impact."

Africa is going digital. Be it mobile money transactions, Uber-style delivery services, or e-commerce platforms, countless African examples can be found where consumers and businesses are benefiting from the digital economy. In five of the continent’s largest countries – Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa and Morocco – Internet penetration is now close to the global average. With examples like these, it’s not hard to imagine Africa’s future being digital.

But the future is not evenly distributed. More than 800 million Africans do not have Internet access. Many live in rural areas, without access to infrastructure, or they simply cannot afford access it where available. The young and the urban are twice likely to have Internet access than the old and the rural. The richest 60 per cent are three times more likely to be connected than the bottom 40 per cent; women are only half are likely to have Internet access than men and others simply do not see the benefits of using the Internet. Lack of basic literacy or digital literacy is a big drag on usage.

Benefits of connectivity:

Reducing poverty, hunger and inequalities, or improving health and education as well as achieving many of the United Nation (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goals; depend on having an accessible, affordable Internet and citizens with the skills to use it. The economic rationale for the necessary investments is clear too: In work commissioned by ICANN, The Boston Consulting Group estimated that countries can – conservatively – increase GDP by 2-3 per cent by reducing the barriers holding back their Internet economy.

So what needs to be done?:

Four areas need concerted attention: more widespread Internet infrastructure, more affordable services, relevant local digital content, and higher digital literacy skills. Successful countries have taken a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder approach to addressing these challenges.

Infrastructure access is a prerequisite. Governments can leverage the successful practices of other countries starting by defining a long-term digital strategy, including a national broadband plan and establish a transparent, independent, regulatory framework. Policymakers also need to promote competition as this tends to encourage investment, drive innovation and reduce prices while incentivising collaboration between network providers through support for network sharing.

Underpinning such priorities should be a drive for cross-border collaboration in areas such as regulatory policy, spectrum allocation and trade. For example, In East Africa the removal of mobile roaming charges resulted in a 950 per cent increase in traffic between Rwanda and Kenya within weeks.

Affordability is a significant challenge. According to A4AI not a single emerging or developing country can claim to meet the UN’s broadband affordability benchmark. But several initiatives can bring costs down. Reducing taxes on devices and access can lead to significant progress. Côte d’Ivoire is leading the way with its government's decision in 2015 to slash taxes on mobile phones from 27 per cent to less than 7 per cent, is one positive example. And while spectrum auctions should be seen as opportunities to attract infrastructure investment, rather than major revenue-generating opportunities, governments should also promote the deployment of DNS root server instances and Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) to enhance local connectivity and resiliency, and reduce costs. Of roughly 500 IXPs worldwide, only about 30 are in Africa.

Local digital content also needs encouragment. Making the Internet a relevant resource requires local-language content, applications and services. Proven steps include removing the hurdles facing small businesses in areas such as trade, tax and the recruitment of skilled employees. Policymakers can also seek to digitise government services to increase citizen involvement, improve the quality of services and raise efficiency. Nigeria’s electronic identification (ID) system revealed 62,000 ghost workers in the public sector, while Nairobi’s water utility was able to significantly cut the time to fix outages based on customer feedback.

Alternatively, they can also encourage technology hubs to provide the infrastructure and entrepreneurial environment for new business creation.  Similarly, promoting local hosting of websites and registration under local country domains to improve website performance offers significant potential.

But they also need to remember that skills need building. Basic literacy often holds back Internet adoption and use. In Sub-Saharan Africa over 40 per cent of adults, half of women, and more than 30 per cent of young people are illiterate. Actions that can make a difference include a drive for full school enrolment, especially for girls; create digital literacy programmes for those no longer in the formal education system; and promote shared facilities to help expose communities to the benefits of Internet access, particularly in remote areas.

Conclusion:

Each country needs to identify which problems affect it most severely and develop relevant solutions. A multi-stakeholder approach involving governments, the private sector, civil society and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can be very effective in building consensus on the most effective policies and actions to adopt.

Significant and lasting investments are needed to deliver the Internet for all Africans. Some may baulk at the magnitudes involved, but government leaders should ask themselves what the costs of inaction are. These are high too – fewer jobs and slower economic development, a bigger digital divide, poorer education, worse healthcare and lower life expectancy. 

For farsighted leaders, the answer will be clear.

*David is a senior advisor in the Munich office of The Boston Consulting Group and a former senior partner and managing director. He has published widely and spoken often on the impact of the Internet on business, government, and society.

 

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Pix: Dean David:

Tony Elumelu Foundation, UNECA join forces on data revolution for Africa

PR@ITRealms

The Tony Elumelu Foundation and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa concluded a three-day working session to create a roadmap on how to implement an ambitious plan to initiate a “data revolution” across Africa.

2015 marks the end of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – a global initiative with the aim of addressing some of the most intransigent problems facing millions of people throughout the developing world including extreme poverty and hunger, gender inequality, and disease, among others. As the world prepares to establish a new set of goals for the post-2015 development agenda, the importance of data for human-oriented and sustainable development will play a critical role , which consequently has led to a global call for a “data revolution” to improve the availability of development data to ensure that no group is left behind.

The Tony Elumelu Foundation’s Africapitalism Institute, which conducts rigorous research on economic and social development, hosted a group of data experts at it’s offices in Lagos in order to help move the conversation forward, recognizing that there is an urgent need for a data revolution in Africa to inform key policies that address some of the continent’s most critical needs. The Institute represents the private sector’s role in the data revolution process as both a provider and a consumer.

In order for Africapitalism – the private sector’s commitment to Africa’s development, through long-term investment in strategic sectors that drive both economic prosperity and social wealth – to take root on the continent, the data revolution must be as inclusive as possible. Commenting on the data revolution, the Director of the Institute, David Rice, stated, “The proliferation and ubiquity of information communication technology, electronic financial transactions, digital commerce, and social media has resulted in an unprecedented amount of data being gathered by the private sector – data that would be extraordinarily useful in the formulation of public policy, allocation of government resources, and creation of effective development strategies for Africa.”

To better meet the challenges and realize the promises of the data revolution through collective effort among African stakeholders, a High Level Conference (HLC) on Data Revolution was held in Addis Ababa, March 2015, in response to a request by African Heads of States. During the HLC, an Africa Data Consensus (ADC) was adopted, which urges African data communities to develop a coordinated response and exploit the new opportunity while responding to the challenge together.

The conversation on the data revolution in Africa continued in Lagos when the Economic Commission for Africa convened data experts to discuss immediate steps to be taken to actualize the data revolution in Africa. The Lagos meeting, hosted by The Tony Elumelu Foundation’s Africapitalism Institute, included experts from the World Wide Web Foundation, United Nations, African Union Commission and the Africa Development Bank. 

The outcome of the meeting becomes a permanent annex to the ADC and includes guiding principles for partnership with other ongoing initiatives at global, national and regional levels. The meeting also included a webinar session that lasted for 90 minutes and had over a hundred participants from across the globe.

At the end of the three day session Dozie Ezigbalike from the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), said “For me, I see the data revolution as an active process of doing things in different and new ways; be disruptive of the status quo if need be, with the objective to empower citizens to become active participants in processes that would affect them. With access to appropriate data, appropriately presented, citizens can demand services that they rightfully deserve, and confirm that the agreed services were actually delivered.”

The World Wide Web Foundation’s Nnenna Nwakanma, likewise, restated her commitment to the data revolution saying “Data is the new gold. The more of it you can generate, use, and share, the more sustainably developed you will be. Opening up data is key to my work at the Web Foundation and engaging our expertise towards the Data Revolution in Africa is a firm decision. We are here to support policy, build capacities, contribute to better governance with data and support citizen engagement. Our work in research, in Open Data, in standards, in data labs and in policy advisory will accompany the implementation of the Africa Data Consensus”.

@The Africapitalism Institute +Remmy Nweke (ITRealms)

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