The Minister, in a statement over the weekend, said that establishing a degree-awarding academy for public relations practice in Nigeria, is a welcome development.

Similarly, Minister Idris has congratulated a Nigerian, Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan, as the newly elected secretary-general of the African Public Relations Association (APRA).

The new APRA Executive Council comprises Arik Karani from Kenya as President, Dr. Michele Mekeme from Cameroon as Vice President, and Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan from Nigeria as Secretary-General.

The Minister words:

“I welcome the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations and the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, to establish a degree-awarding academy for public relations practice in Nigeria.

“I equally welcome the recent election of a Nigerian, Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan, as the Secretary-General of the African Public Relations Association (APRA).

“Also worthy of note is the fact that Public Relations (PR) has now been designated as a cadre in the Federal Civil Service, with effect from December 2023.

“The Information Officer Cadre has been re-designated to ‘Information and Public Relations Officer Cadre’, and the Executive Cadre to ‘Executive Officer (Information and Public Relations)’. The NIPR played a critical role in championing this, and deserve commendation.

“Nigeria will continue to play a leading role in strengthening and elevating public relations practice at home and across Africa. Recently, when I received the President of the African Public Relations Association, Mr. Arik Karani, he commended Nigeria in this regard”, Idris said.

He added, “[Nigeria] was, for the longest time, the only country in Africa that had a law that professionalized public relations. It was Nigeria that started it on the continent, and only last year did Zambia come out with its own law. So now we have two countries on the continent, and only now in Kenya, the bill for professionalizing public relations is at the second reading in Parliament.”

“Rest assured that the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will continue to provide the enabling environment for everybody within Nigeria’s communications industry to thrive”, he said.

• The new research provides scalable lessons on how to drive value creation by addressing systemic socio economic exclusion at the local and global levels.
• Six unique case studies demonstrate how cross-sector collaboration and best practice sharing can sustainably spur equity, innovation and growth for all.
• Read more about the report here.

A report released on Friday by the Schwab Foundation’s Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship outlines a series of social innovation solutions for integrating racial and ethnic equity into business practices and unlocking economic growth worldwide.

The report, Innovating for Equity: Unlocking Value for Communities and Businesses – published in partnership with Echoing Green, the GHR Foundation and Dalberg – provides pathways for collaboration between social innovators from racial and ethnically marginalized communities, governments and companies to harness largely untapped opportunities for the global economy.

“This report represents a call to action for leaders from across the public and private sectors to address racial and ethnic equity – not just as a moral imperative, but as a clear and compelling business case,” said François Bonnici, director of the Schwab Foundation and Head of Foundations at the World Economic Forum. “By doing so, they can contribute to a more just and equitable society and unlock new avenues for sustainable economic growth and innovation.”

In the US alone, the widening racial wealth gap is estimated to cost up to $1.5 trillion in economic growth by 2028.

This translates to a cap on GDP growth of 6%. The report shows how key stakeholders can work together to unlock this potential and galvanize the global economy.

To this end, the report features social innovators who have successfully partnered with companies and governments, providing clear, actionable lessons on how to drive value creation by addressing systemic economic exclusion.

These cases illustrate examples of social innovators who are scaling solutions in ways that combine social value with commercial opportunity.

“Supporting these largely untapped areas of innovation and growth has the potential to include millions of customers, employees, entrepreneurs and investors in the global economy,” said Cheryl L. Dorsey, president of Echoing Green. “Economic equity can be a pivotal driver of growth in the US and globally. Now is the time for corporations, policy-makers and innovators to come together and drive meaningful, system-wide transformation.”

Using six unique case studies, the report presents three scalable pathways for collaboration between social innovators, corporations and governments. Each of the three pathways combines a socially innovative approach to value creation that also addresses inequities at the root level:

1. Expanding markets:

This approach highlights the value of providing products and services that better meet the needs of different communities.

Through the examples of two innovators in disparate geographic contexts – sub-Saharan Africa and the US – the report shows how tailored delivery models can improve local business operations and sustainably grow and empower local communities.

2. Unlocking talent:

This spotlights how more equitable hiring practices can unlock untapped talent pools, reshape employment opportunities and remove existing barriers faced by individuals, businesses, and communities.

The case studies illustrating the way forward are two US-based social innovators who have strengthened their talent pipelines through efforts to dismantle racial and ethnic biases faced by Black and Latinx communities.

3. Broadening networks:

This pathway focuses on the importance of building more diverse and inclusive supplier ecosystems that can help counteract entrenched historical marginalization.

This is exemplified in the report by two social innovators who are connecting underrepresented Black and Indigenous vendors with global companies, bringing new markets and fair compensation to these vendors, and new and more authentic products to consumers worldwide.

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According to the 2020 World Bank Doing Business report, Nigeria ranks 171 out of 190 countries in getting electricity and electricity access is seen as one of the major constraints for the private sector, leaving 85 million Nigerians without access to the grid electricity.

In efforts to address challenges such as these, as well as other challenges related to the country’s economic growth, Innovate UK KTN’s Global Alliance Africa project is well under way in Nigeria.

This is a six-year project, funded by UK Aid, designed to strengthen, and scale local innovation and business environments in the country, with the long-term ambition to build new and stronger UK-African partnerships to maximise the creation of inclusive market access, funding and investment opportunities through innovation knowledge transfer which in turn may lead to self-sustaining economic growth.

Global Alliance Africa’s Knowledge Transfer Manager for Nigeria, Joshua Adedeji says: “With socio-economic challenges such as unemployment and poverty posing as the biggest threats, there’s no better time to look to innovation and international collaboration as the solutions that will boost the economy. Our aim is to collaborate with local innovation ecosystem practitioners and beneficiaries to enhance and strengthen innovation capacity and support for economic, social, environmental and cultural value creation in Nigeria.”

Partnerships successfully formed through the collaborations include Nigeria Climate Innovation Centre (NCIC) and Rural Electrification Agency (REA) on the Energy Catalyst project. This has also paved the more for potential partnerships such as the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), First Bank Nigeria, Nigeria British Chamber of Commerce, theNigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines, and Agriculture (NACCIMA) and others.

Adedeji further notes that the Global Alliance Africa project is driving this via three key pillars: Local to Global, Access to Funding and Connected Innovation, under which the following interventions sit:

Place-Based Innovation – aims to leverage UK, Nigerian and pan-African expertise, networks and resources in order to build capacity for local innovation ecosystem players to drive forwards stronger, more sustainable and more inclusive local ecosystems, such the Ekiti state in Nigeria.

Open Innovation: – will expand business-to-business partnerships, accelerate penetration of new innovation and increase supply chain robustness & diversification.

Collaborative R&D – aims to leverage existing funding in order to forge collaborative R&D partnerships in key thematic areas of mutual interest for UK-Africa businesses, innovators & researchers.

Global Innovation Networks – aims to establish global research and innovation networks that build collaborations and/or partnerships between KTN’s established Innovation Networks and Nigeria’s priority sector thematic challenges.

“Innovation is imperative for the economic development of any nation, especially for Nigeria, which is still in the process of growing its innovation ecosystem.

To achieve this, we need to build a fundamental innovation paradigm that will give our country incredible economic growth.

It is for this reason, that Global Alliance Africa is driving knowledge transfer and collaboration that fosters long-lasting, strategic partnerships in Nigeria to accelerate innovations that promote inclusive economic growth, job creation and reduction of poverty. Through this, together we can drive positive change through innovation.” concludes Adedeji.