Category Archives: Outlets

IEEE Spectrum, News

As Nigeria’s Cashless Transition Falters, POS Operators Thrive

Cash is expensive in Nigeria. When undercover agents for the Central Bank of Nigeria tried to buy cash on the open market, they found sellers charging markups of 20 to 40 percent of face value, the bank governor, Olayemi Cardoso, said at a March event in Abuja. Since 2012, the Central Bank has promoted a series of policies to reduce the amount of cash in circulation and shift Nigerians to electronic payments, which are lower cost, more secure, and more traceable. The Central Bank releases limited cash to commercial banks, who in turn cannot match public demand. When the banks do have cash, middlemen often take it in bulk to sell onward at a higher price.

In exchange, the Central Bank also built an ever-more-capable digital infrastructure for electronic payments, boosting Nigeria’s financial technology industry, and the volume of electronic payments in Nigeria grew around 16 times from 2018 to 2024. “Once that foundation was there, the cashless economy has done well,” says electrical engineer Funke Opeke, an eminence in the Nigerian technology scene who founded and later sold a crucial telecommunications and data services company, MainOne.

On the one hand, that is a victory. On the other hand, only those with reliable access to the Internet (about half of Nigeria’s population) can count on electronic payments. The rest still need cash.

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IEEE Spectrum, Lagos, News

Breaking Free from Nigeria’s Grid

Nigeria’s electrical grid collapses so regularly that entrepreneur Lanre Bello bought not one but two backup generators for his coffee shop in Ikeja, a middle-class neighborhood adjacent to Lagos’ airports. He also has a second coffee maker because the first blackout he experienced (before he bought the generators) blew out his first coffee machine. Unfortunately, that kind of waste and the associated loss of opportunities are common across the country’s economy: The World Bank estimates Nigeria’s faulty grid costs the country 2 percent of its GDP annually. 

In addition to poor stability, the grid only reaches about 60 percent of Nigeria’s population, leaving around 86 million people in the dark, the largest population without electricity in the world.

For a long time, Nigerians could point their fingers at one culprit: the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), a state monopoly that managed production, transmission, and distribution. Yet a decades-long process of privatization and decentralization of electricity generation and distributionmeans that now there are more parties to blame for equally poor service. While politicians and power engineers point fingers at each other, some Nigerians are tired of waiting and are taking it upon themselves to try to build their own solutions.

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Financial Times, News

Spain’s smaller start-up hubs play to their strengths to attract investment

Entrepreneur Félix Martín-Aguilar is looking overseas to expand his Málaga-based start-up. It’s not that he has anything against the Spanish city, his hometown, but Aliqindoi, a device as a service platform, is ready for the big time, he says, and in some ways his choice shows how Málaga is, too.

In the past, that might have meant seeking venture capital funding in Madrid or a buyer in Barcelona’s tech ecosystem, but Martín-Aguilar and colleagues are aiming beyond Spain thanks to a partnership between Málaga incubator BIC Euronova and Berkeley Skydeck, a start-up accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We have a chance to be a Silicon Valley company,” Martín-Aguilar says, although he intends to keep the Málaga location, with no need for a Madrid or Barcelona stepping stone. Had he not started his company at BIC Euronova “we probably wouldn’t even have heard about” the partnership, Martín-Aguilar says.

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IEEE Spectrum, News

Can Qubits Teleport Through Today’s Internet Lines?

 By LUCAS LAURSEN and MARGO ANDERSON

For decades, researchers have tried to squeeze quantum signals alongside classical signals in fiber optic cables. Quantum bits, however, are based on delicate quantum states of individual particles, which can be disrupted by thermal noise and other factors. 

Last month, Northwestern University engineers sent a pair of entangled photons more than 30 kilometers through a fiber that was also carrying a 400 gigabits-per-second classical signal. The entangled states then enabled a quantum data transfer process called teleportation. Quantum teleportation involves transmitting the quantum state of one particle onto another particle at a distant location, effectively allowing the quantum information (a.k.a. the quantum bits or qubits) to be “teleported” across space. 

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