Olatunde Olajide is an Associate Partner at Verraki Africa, a tech firm that provides business solutions to drive inclusive high-quality growth for the nation’s Small and Medium Enterprises, big firms, and governments. In this interview with Nairametrics, Olajide urges SMEs and other enterprises to improve their technology resilience and build resilient organisations. Excerpts:

What is the biggest technology gap you have seen in the response of businesses to the pandemic?

I will like to answer this question from the perspective of how some industries have reacted. I think it was clear that several industries were more ahead of the curve than others in terms of digital readiness. For example, we know that the banking sector already put in play digital offerings on digital channels, ahead of the pandemic, and so it was easy for them to easily upgrade some of the services and just maintain that during the pandemic.

We also know that the telecommunications industry was also digitally ahead, with digital channels and offerings.

What sectors were taken unawares?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the same experience for other industries, e.g education. There was a World Bank survey last year that tried to understand the impact of the pandemic on education, and the results revealed that only one-third of the sample survey of primary and secondary school students were able to engage in any form of virtual education during the lockdown.

The ability to participate in a virtual class was dependent on several factors. First, is the hurdle of cost, which may be less of an issue for pupils in private schools, but a significant challenge for the bulk of students who are in public schools. During the lockdown, the government eventually came up with several initiatives, e.g., for students to listen to the radio and television. But at the beginning, it was not too easy and it took some weeks of catching up for that sector to even make any headway regarding their readiness.

The health sector also experienced some delays. During the lockdown, it was almost impossible to have consultations done, till after they were able to use the channels that we typically use for communication to start consultations.

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