Analytics & Azure App Modernization
Kaduna State Government eases business operations in Nigeria’s North-West
Wragby utilized Azure App Service and Power BI to develop a web portal and reporting dashboards to help the Kaduna State Environmental Protection Authority (KEPA) curb inefficiencies associated with the manual process of issuing the Environmental Impact Assessment Certificate (EIA).
Dariana Ishaku is a mid-tier textile manufacturer based in Kaduna State in Nothern Nigeria; she is one of the few textile manufacturers struggling to survive against the damaging whiplash of the tough operating climate in Nigeria. Having discovered a niche seasonal Sub-Sahara Africa export market in indigenous textiles, Dariana needed to expand her factory to meet demand and cement her niche. With a make-or-break push to be up and running before the season starts, Dariana prepared and submitted her applications for construction, environment, and business permits. While that meant visiting different offices, and learning how to upload documents to different systems, Ishaku’s nemesis was not making the applications; it was the long, unpredictable delay that followed.
Dariana Ishaku is one of the true-to-life cases that motivated the Kaduna State government to initiate the Ease of Doing Business analytics project.
To crush this challenge, Kaduna state aspired to have a global view of all permits and application processes across all the ministries, departments, and agencies statewide. That, its government believes, is the best route to surfacing insights that will not only allow the administration to identify the bottlenecks but also to streamline its operations and activate continuous monitoring through the layers of government.
The Business Need
With a population of over 6,000,000 in 2006, Kaduna state is the foremost manufacturing hub in the Northern and Middle belt regions of Nigeria. In the last five years, the state government has made tremendous advances in the Ease of Doing Business Index, ranking as one of the five states that showed the largest advance toward the global good practice, recording an Average Distance to Frontier score of 65.97. (https://www.doingbusiness.org/Nigeria).
But so long as business owners like Dariana continue to have delays in processing permits, the state knows that it has more work to do to improve its business ease environment and attract investments.
In acknowledging the pattern of delay, Kaduna state identified the challenges it needed to solve and enumerated the potential impact of solving these problems adequately to support the state’s manufactures of textiles, machinery, steel, aluminum, plastics, leather goods, and furniture, among other things.
The government therefore needed a solution that could provide centralized, actionable insights into all business permits and approvals across the state, pull data from disparate systems and legacy applications into one dashboard, make the data, dashboards, and accompanying tools accessible to administrators at different levels in the state, aid real-time identification of bottlenecks, monitoring of policy impacts, and spotting of trends across the various data silos.
The Solution
Wragby won the right to develop the Ease of Doing Business (EODB) solution for Kaduna State, stopping other competitors from making inroad with this cherished customer. Wragby Business Solutions & Technologies is a Multi-cloud partner with multiple Co-Sell ready solutions in Africa. Analytics is one of our fastest-growing segments with a near-endless pool of application possibilities.
To ascertain to the decision-makers that our EODB the solution stood out amidst competition, we did a series of business workshops, demonstrating the power of the Microsoft BI cloud and its ability not only to ingest data from disparate sources but also scale as the state grows. This, coupled with the web-based, real-time access, made it a winner.
At implementation, we used Power BI, through a combination of specific queries, to ingest data from a wide range of data sources and unrelated business applications, delivering insights that enable government IT and political stakeholders to make quick and informed decisions in real-time.
The versatility resulting from the unique combination of Data Factory, Data Lake Store, SQL Database Hyperscale, and Power BI integrated to deliver the EODB solution was a key differentiation against other analytics tools. The EODB solution met the need for a solution that centralizes, consolidates, and makes available all Kaduna State MDAs data points on customized dashboards with visibility and drill-down capabilities into hindrances experienced by applicants. The combination of Azure Data Services (Data Factory, Data Lake Store, Azure SQL Hyperscale, Azure Analysis Service, and Power BI) made the EODB solution elastic and scalable, showcasing the powerful automation and analytics capabilities that Microsoft Azure delivers.
The Result
Before the deployment of the EODB solution, businesses in Kaduna experienced long waits for permits, were unsure of the causes of the permit delays, and endured the resultant uncertainty and higher cost of doing business. This also negatively affected the attractiveness of the state for businesses while costing the state millions of dollars per year in lost revenue.
Now the state has an instant and global understanding of any issues relating to permits, instead of waiting for a patchwork of complaints, our solution helped Kaduna State to be more proactive, minimizing backlog and delay unlike before where it took a long period to get approved permits for their business
The solution deployed also helped with sustainability and increase of government revenue, positioning the state to take giant strides in solving the ease of doing business problems of the state sustainably.
With the solution, there is improved transparency in business regulation, accessibility, and communication between applicants and officials.
Wragby continues to replicate the EODB solution to other customers in Africa with the possibility to reach an even broader market, especially in Energy, Finance, and Manufacturing.
