By Emeka Aginam

In a committed effort to retool local capacity for global competitiveness, Zinox Technologies Group has concluded arrangements to sponsor the Chris Uwaje, the the Oracle of the Nigeria IT industry to speak at the 2017 Global Internet of Things, in Geneva, Switzerland.

The former President of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria, ISPON, and the Africa Chair on Communications and Publicity GioT Geneva 2017- will be speaking as a panelist on Africa perspectives and challenges on Ipv6. Uwaje is selected and invited to represent Africa and speak as a panelist of the Global IPv6
Forum on the state and challenges of Internet Version 6 (Ipv6) at the 1st Global Internet of Things Summit, GioTS in Geneva, Switzerland 2017).
With this sponsorship, ZINOX assumes fundamental ledership of national ICT Policy and strategy matters, where government should at all time be at the forefront.

Given the future requirements of 70% youths that makeup Nigeria/Africa Population, Zinox is lighting up the way to the sustainable progress of the Nigerian nation.
According to Dr. Leo Stan Ekeh, Chairman of Zinox Africa stands to gain immensely if she can leapfrog from her present deep slumber on ICT ecosystem development and engage the values of (IoTs) whose estimated market potential is valued at $19 trillion USD by 2020.

Zinox projections is that the world has just at the embryonic stage and process of the global digital transformation and beliefs that no other startegy is capable of securing the economic empowerment, massive Youth employment, future development progress and national security of Nigeria and Africa.

Today, “IoT is rapidly evolving with the substantial risk of not paying attention to safety, reliability, privacy, security, and interoperability. Research has a fundamental role to enable a globally interoperable IoT and to make it right,” Sebastien Ziegler, General Chair and President of the IoT forum, said.

According to Latif Ladid, Co-Chair and President of IPv6 Forum “GIoTS 2017 will attract experts from industry and research in current and emerging technologies such as 5G-based IoT, software defined IoT, IoT-centric Cloud Computing, including the Social Internet of Things”
For Dr. Antonio Skarmeta, TPC Chair, “The selected technical topics seek some maturity in IoT across the board. There are many facets that need research and experimental pilots to put the pieces together and give IoT innovation a roadmap”.

GIoTS 2017 is supported by the IoT Week of the IoT Forum, The IPv6 Forum, the IEEE 5G subcommittee, the IEEE SDN-NFV subcommittee as well as the IEEE BiG Data TC. It will be collocated in Geneva with the IoT Week 2017, bringing together cutting edge research results, the IoT innovation community and the UN system with a unique worldwide outreach.

According to the United Nations Development’s Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report of 2013 (UNDP, 2013), Africa contributes 35 of the 45 poorest countries. Given these high poverty levels, most African governments , especially the Sub-Saharan Africa are still struggling to provide basic needs such as food, shelter, health, water and sanitation and education among others and therefore technology innovations take a back seat. While the world’s Development Index stands at 0.694, the Sub-Saharan Africa’s one is at 0.475.

The IPv6 session will attract speakers from the 5 Continents to outline the deployment efforts of IPv6-based IoT research and best practices. The deployment in different countries is taking different shapes and forms considering the differing continental user requirements at this stage of deployment.

This session will try to harmonize and draw a common roadmap for deployment of IoT networking capabilities and architectural definitions to make sure “Internet of Things” are scalable,inclusive of several communication media, secure, future proof and viable for businesses and endusers. Each representative is challenged to research his/her continent to outline the various IoT initiatives and industry showcases and various user requirements, challenges, security and privacy issues and obstacles that could enrich the discussion in this worldwide IoT session.