68-year-old Jean Mongu Bele has become the first Congolese to design and produce smartphones.
Born on 27 February 1957 in Bandundu, DR Congo, he has devoted his career to science and technology.
Bele’s smartphone is called Okapi Mobile, which he founded in 2019 in Boston, United States.
His Okapi smartphone is dust-resistant and water-resistant. It also has facial recognition and fingerprint detection.
Bele is not only producing smartphones. He also designed and produced the Okapi Win8 computer, the first internationally certified computer designed by a Congolese.
The minimum cost for an Okapi smartphone is $116 and $269 for the Okapi computer.
Bele is currently working on building an assembly and a manufacturing facility that would be built in DR Congo, and it is expected to employ up to 20,000 people in DR Congo.