Not All Heroes Wear Capes – Meet Sam Kodo, The Togolese Who Built Low-cost Computers For Students In Togo

People like Sam Kodo are the reasons why I believe that the future of Africa is going to be more superb than what we are just experiencing in the continent at the moment.

As an agent of change, Sam Kodo has taken a huge step in contributing to solving the problems he discovered in his home country Togo, by building low-cost computers for students in the country, but his journey did not start this way.

Back to some years, when Sam was just a kid, he used to dismantle old and scrap electronics like TV and radios and then use their components for his own inventions and these actions made him finally create his own first robot only at the age of eight.

One of the things that contribute to the success of Sam as an engineer is the support he got from both his parents.

For example, his father, who is also a lecturer of physics at the University of Lome made it possible for the young Sam then to have easy access to the University’s library where Sam read books about equations and formulas and also electronics.

From this moment, with what he has learnt, Sam finally became a self-taught engineer, building different things using mostly scraped materials. He built his first robot at the age of 8. Of course, his mother also played a big part in the success of Sam as well.

One way to prove that is when Sam himself made it clear that sometimes, his mother would buy him toys, not to have fun with them but just to dismantle them and use them for his own experiments in building something totally different.

The support he got from his parents, backed by his passion in what he does has made Sam Kodo to be one of the people who are transforming the face of Africa.

While he was at the university, Sam Kodo found it hard to have easy access to a computer that he could use in doing his assignments. So with this problem, Sam came up with the idea of building his own computer and making it less costly compared to a standard computer, because he believed there are also many students like him who are also going through the same challenge like his and thus building something like this will make access to computers easier for these students at an affordable price. He sells his computers for just US$90!

The production of these computers was made possible through his company, Infinite Loop, a company he founded in 2013 with the money he won from Forum des Jeunes Entrepreneurs, a national competition for young entrepreneurs in Togo.

According to Sam, he said he got inspired doing what he does after reading the stories of the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison in a magazine while he was young and since then Sam has never for once relent in expressing his passion through his works through which he is making Africa a better place.

His contributions in making Africa a better place through technology has made Sam Kodo to amass notable number of awards and recognitions to his name, which includes Anzisha Prize Fellow in 2014, Mandela Washington Fellows in 2015, Africa4Tech, an event held in Marrakech, Morocco in 2016 and many more.

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