The following is a "must listen" for every African techie. The speaker is 32-year old Solomon Aseefa, one of Technology Review's top innovators(2011) under 35.
When Solomon Assefa arrived at MIT as a 17-year-old from Ethiopia seven years ago, he barely knew the difference between a bit and a byte. He also had barely heard of MIT. “I wasn’t too aware of MIT’s status or how good a school it was until I was admitted,” says Assefa, the youngest of seven children of a lower-middle class, Addis Ababa family. Continue reading here
He speaks on ways IBM has developed technology for its products as a company and invested in several environments around the world. At the same time, he motivates his audience that Africa must not continue to depend on the next technology to come from the Western world, but to learn to use existing technology(accessible and getting cheaper and cheaper everyday) to solve its own challenges.
Dont re-invent the wheel. Think about how you can use an existing technology to take you to the next level.
