In middle school, the young boy would scavenge nearby trash yards in the capital of Freetown to find parts for his inventions. "I'd go to bed, then wake up after midnight," he told the audience with a laugh. "My mom would wake up most nights to see our living room transformed into a small electronic junkard." Doe had no formal engineering training, but he tinkered endlessly. "I just figured things out, just picked things and took them home and made things on my own. Sometimes it can take me a week, sometimes a month, but I just believe I can do it so I just keep on going."
He first built small generators to solve what he views as his country's most pressing scarcity: electricity. "There was a problem affecting my community and I wanted to do something about it which was lack of transferred information from one community to another," he said. "I decided to a build a station for the people to be able to use to talk about issues, also educate people." After working as a radio engineer for his friends and neighbors, he'd pieced together enough skill and equipment to begin a radio station where he broadcast under the name DJ Focus. His inventive spirit only came under the spotlight when, just last year at age 15, he was discovered by a Sierra Leonean Ph.D. student at MIT during a high school innovation challenge.
He is also currently working with Canadian provider Sierra Wifi to build solar panels and transmitters in all 400-odd schools and universities in Sierra Leone to power computers and bring Internet access to remote regions, all made possible by a $100,000 grant. Up next: a windmill prototype, which is a few months from being finished. "There are so many more problems I'd like to solve, how can human energy contribute to electricity."
 |
| A boy stands on a road at dawn in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on November 21, 2012 |
No comments:
Post a Comment