By Modupe Gbadeyanka

The urgent need to bridge the digital gap for female entrepreneurs has again been emphasised by the Country Head of Zoho Nigeria, Mr Kehinde Ogundare.

Speaking at the Guardian Woman Festival held at the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos recently, Mr Ogundare stressed that technology does not replace the strengths women already bring to business, such as relationship building and community engagement, but instead, it amplifies them, enabling entrepreneurs to reach wider audiences and scale more efficiently.

“The difference is not talent. Not capital. Not ambition. It is digital adoption,” he said during his keynote address titled Give Value, Gain Growth: Women Driving Reciprocal Innovation in the Digital Economy.

“Smart tools create smart businesses. Smart businesses create strong economies. When women entrepreneurs and leaders have access to the right tools, the possibilities for growth are limitless,” he added.

Zoho Nigeria partnered with Guardian Newspapers for the event as part of activities to mark a month-long initiative celebrating women’s contributions to business, governance, and social development while promoting digital empowerment for female entrepreneurs.

The Guardian Women Festival, themed Reciprocity, was to encourage the exchange of value, networks, and digital innovation to strengthen women-led businesses and foster collaboration.

While Nigeria has the highest concentration of women-owned businesses in Africa, fewer than 30 per cent currently use digital tools to manage or grow their operations.

During the festival’s panel session tagged Women in the Business of Digital Innovation, the Sales Manager for Zoho Nigeria, Ms Zubaida Aliyu, highlighted how women are uniquely positioned to create shared value in digital spaces by building platforms that encourage knowledge sharing, mentorship, and collaboration.

She also challenged organisations that continue to view women’s digital inclusion primarily as corporate social responsibility rather than a strategic business priority.

“Tech creates a level playing field,” Ms Aliyu said, noting that digital platforms remove limitations related to location and infrastructure size.

Addressing organisations that overlook the economic value of inclusive digital strategies, she added, “They are leaving money on the table — they need to think of it as a strategy, not charity.”

Through its participation in the Guardian Woman Festival, Zoho reaffirmed its commitment to providing affordable and accessible enterprise-grade technology to businesses of all sizes. By helping women transition from manual effort to digital efficiency, Zoho aims to support entrepreneurs in building scalable enterprises and ensure their sustained success in Africa’s digital economy.

By Dipo Olowookere

The Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for MTN Nigeria, Mr Babalola Oyeleye, has disclosed that the telecommunications company intends to expand its infrastructure to give its customers quality service.

The demand for connectivity in Nigeria is growing, and with a new forecast predicting the Internet of Things (IoT) market to reach $38.7 billion by 2030, stakeholders, especially operators, are already positioning themselves to dominate the space

Government and private sector investments in digital transformation have created an ecosystem that includes system integrators and security specialists. Industries such as utilities and agriculture are leading the charge, adopting IoT to solve localised problems like power theft and low crop yields.

Currently, 4G coverage has reached approximately 80 per cent of Nigeria’s population, with 5G services already in major cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano. This connectivity backbone is essential for the low-latency communication required by millions of connected devices.

“Reaching the $38.7 billion mark isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about the millions of data points helping Nigerian SMEs and large corporations make smarter decisions every day. Our goal is to ensure the connectivity is there to meet this soaring demand,” Mr Oyeleye noted.

As the ecosystem matures, the focus is shifting toward all-in-one solutions that simplify the user experience. With ongoing investments in NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT) and other low-power connectivity options, the next five years are set to see an explosion in smart city and smart home applications across the country.

By Adedapo Adesanya

South African-founded Refiant AI has raised $5 million to slash the energy footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) in a seed round led by VoLo Earth Ventures, a top climate technology fund.

The startup uses nature-inspired algorithms to radically compress AI models, slashing the hardware and energy required to run them. The new fund will be used to scale Refiant’s team – which already includes a former Google Cloud architect, a Cambridge PhD researcher, and an engineer with NASA experience – to build out a platform and to accelerate enterprise partnerships.

According to a statement shared with Business Post, the company is in active conversations with several multinational technology firms exploring how Refiant’s approach could reduce their AI compute costs while maintaining data and energy sovereignty.

“AI’s growing energy footprint is one of the most urgent and underappreciated challenges in the climate space,” said Mr Sid Gutta, the company’s co-founder. “The industry’s default answer is to build more data centres and consume more power. Ours is to make the AI itself dramatically more efficient.”

The company said it has already successfully demonstrated it can compress a 120 billion parameter AI model to run on a standard laptop, reducing energy requirements by over 80 per cent while preserving near-identical quality. It achieved this to run on a MacBook Pro with just 12GB of RAM. The same model would normally require hardware with at least 80GB of memory. The model retained 95-99 per cent of its fidelity, ran alongside a second AI model on the same machine, and the entire process took four hours with no cloud computing required.

For Refiant, its approach will help businesses reduce their carbon footprint and adopt AI to stay competitive. The energy required to process a single AI prompt on standard infrastructure could power roughly 100 equivalent prompts using Refiant’s approach.

The current breakthrough results were attained at the end of last year, and since then, the team have been gearing up to demonstrate successfully exceeding these results with further compression, longer context windows and model traceability.

“The AI industry is spending hundreds of billions scaling infrastructure when the real breakthrough is the ability to do more with radically less,” said Mr Viroshan Naicker, co-Founder and a mathematician with published research in networks and quantum systems. “Nature doesn’t build by brute force. Evolution optimises. We’ve applied that principle to AI – and the results speak for themselves.”

“AI’s biggest constraint isn’t demand – it’s energy,” added Mr Joseph Goodman, Managing Partner, VoLo Earth. “What’s been missing is a fundamentally more efficient way to compute. Refiant’s architecture replaces brute-force scaling with a far more efficient, nature-inspired approach that lowers energy use while increasing capability. That’s the kind of breakthrough needed to make AI sustainable on a global scale.”