Stay hungry. Stay foolish- RIP Steve Jobs

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

The power of information

People use internet for different reasons and so are social media platforms, I know of a young man who has literally transformed his farming through these platforms- facebook to be precise- an initiative that earned him an interview with the Google team through his ' Mapping fish ponds' project using the android IDEOS smartphone that is now selling like a hot cake in the Kenyan market.

Meet Zack Matera, a farmer from Eldoret Kenya who is demonstrating to the world just what internet can do for you.

Internet as a catalyst for development

"If they mess with the internet, I'll mess them up" that's a friend of mines political ideology when he was asked about his political views, a view that am sure most of us share especially those whose daily activities revolve around the internet.
Internet is quickly becoming an integral part in the day to day activities of most people: entrepreneurs, businesses, academia etc its lack therefore literally stalls/messes up these activities. It holds the key to so many benefits: knowledge, education, employment, political activism and the promise of a better future and a means of empowerment, it is also the link that gives our children access to high quality educational resources; it helps our entrepreneurs and small businesses compete and grow; and the internet holds the promise of better health care and a more affordable entertainment.

Computer literacy and other aspect of computer technology are prerequisites for using internet technology, a fact that has greatly lowed internet penetration especially in rural and slum areas because majority of these people are mostly computer illiterate and are either ignorant or simply don’t know the benefits that can be accrued from the internet. This can also be attributed to the fact that in most rural or slum areas, we have poor infrastructures in terms of power lines etc which thus discourages the use of gadgets like computers which requires electricity to operate.

Internet is quickly curving a niche as a great tool for catalyzing development initiatives, it has a direct link to social, economic and even political developments and therefore the Kenyan government directive that IT be a compulsory course for all students joining public universities is a most welcome move but I would rather it be compulsory right from high school if not primary school to give our young-stars an early start of computer literacy which as I have indicated earlier is a prerequisite for using internet technology.

Development-I believe-is directly proportional to the degree of internet penetration, granted, internet has its disadvantages but dwelling on these disadvantages without looking at the bigger picture is like simply refuting the benefits of computers because it leads to ‘loss of jobs’, a so backward argument that you can only be forgiven because you know not what you are saying!

So what can that poor woman or that poor kid do with internet back in the village/slum yet they don’t have food on the table, shouldn’t they be worrying about better things other than Internet?

Long time ago, we had three main basic needs: food, shelter and clothing others were simply luxuries if you wish, but today, computers, phones and internet are necessities if not needs. You talk internet and you talk information, that poor woman can learn a lot from the internet- from what type of crops to plant during dry season, from how to carry out a first aid of snake bite to save her baby before she can take her to hospital, from how to find market for her produce and sell them at fair prices etc. That poor kid who can’t afford to buy books, can get all that materials from the internet and compete fairly with that boy whose parents can afford, he can learn new programming languages, can learn how to hack, can learn how to play guitar and loads of some other stuff, who knows he can even show the world his musical prowess like Justin Bieber did- see where he is right now.

But the challenge is, if they cannot afford to put food on the table, who will take care of the internet bill, who will buy them computers coz internet and computes go hand in hand? This is where the government should come in, to ensure that every sub location, market place, public school has a library equipped with computers and good internet speed, maybe restrict the time per sitting to say 30 minutes per person but offer the service free to encourage many people to use computers and internet and tap these benefits, the government should have its own innovation hubs and organize events where these people can show the skills acquired from the internet, by so doing, the government will eliminate the worry these poor people go through of how to pay these bills but at the same time foster  an information rich society where people can gain skills to do plenty of stuff without just sitting back and waiting to be employed in a society where jobs are becoming a scarcity, they say nothing is as dangerous as a wounded animal who knows it can survive, I say nothing is as motivating to the poor as knowing they can improve their situation! And internet holds the key to that.

MY ICT4D JOURNEY

 The D-day, Exams

It`s interesting how the things that we pay least attention to could just be the big things that we never foresaw. I had just finished doing this very bad exam paper, you know those exams that you finish and you don’t want to talk to anyone? The ones you finish and you don’t want to set your eyes on that lecturer who set the exams? Yeah it was that kind of paper (Network administration) that I had finished and I was secretly cursing that lecturer for being a sadist, all I wanted to do was to submit my paper and disappear from that examination room. But as fate would have it, just after submitting my paper, the alleged sadist lecturer insisted that I give him my full names and email address apparently to register me to some ICT4D program that he insisted I had to participate in, so grudgingly I gave him the details but dint think much about it.

ICT4D CONSORTIUM

 Days later, I got a mail that I had been registered as a member of the ICT4D consortium and that I was expected to be an active member. We had a one month ICT4D course which was coordinated virtually (through Skype), I had not used this social media platform before, we were given different topics to research on and discuss. My research topic was “how to use ICTs to curb insecurity: taking Kidnapping in Kenya as my case study” the course was a joint collaboration between my university- Maseno University and several other African and European Universities like University of Joensuu, Finland, Tumaini University, Iringa University college, Tanzania, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana, Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique, Universite Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), Senegal, Association of African Universities and Entertainment Robotics, Denmark.

 It was coordinated by some of the great heads in ICT4D field like Prof. Tim Unwin and Ugo Valauri of Royal Holloway University, Clint Rogers UEF, John K. Alwala of Maseno university, Jorrit Mulder from Amsterdam, Dr. Ibrahim Niang of Senegal among other high voltage personalities in the ICT4D arena. I must admit this course was a great eye opener to me, it opened my mind to what exactly this catchy abbreviation means, what it entails and the benefits and potential that can be accrued from it.

ICT4D exchange program in Finland

 I did give my best during the first round of our ICT4D discussions, I must admit I just dint see my future in ICT4D, or otherwise put, I just dint pay much attention to it to see the potential that it would hold for a rather ambitious soul like mine who dreamt and still dreams of nothing but to become a data or telecommunications engineer after Kenya`s JAB refused to register me to my childhood course and career dream-Electrical engineering so I had to alter my career path :)                                                                            

Mostly for supervised and assessed student attachments, students are not allowed to look for placement places outside the country unless otherwise (In Maseno) and this is one of the most stressing moments of a student’s life because failure to secure yourself a place tantamount to failure to graduation, besides your place of attachment greatly determines your place of first employment. I was undergoing this very predicament ( searching for an attachment place) when my sadist lecturer turned mentor, friend and dad informed me that arrangements were underway for me to go to Finland  for an ICT4D student exchange program that would as well double as my attachment in UEF Joensuu campus.

Three months stay in Finland

On 6^th of May 2010, I left Kenya to attend a three month ICT4D exchange program cum attachment in Finland at University of Eastern Finland. Exchange students came from all over the world (all the 5 continents were represented) and I proudly represented my country. Apparently the exchange students were suppose to be PHD students or at worse Masters Students, but here I was, an undergraduate student who had no wealth of expertise in this field save for an open mind to learn and give my best. My lecturer greatly encouraged me and supported me in all ways and convinced me that I could do it...

We were divided into three major groups:

•  Contextual ICT 
•   Multimedia for learning and
•  ICT curriculum development

I was in the latter group where we were mandated to develop a four year Bsc ICT curriculum for Maseno University, Kenya and a one year Teacher Training ICT curriculum for Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique.

Meeting with professors and high profile individuals in academia

The whole program exposed me to different high profile personalities in the academic arena including but not limited to Prof Marti Tedre from Iringa University, Tanzania, Prof Erkki Sutinen of UEF currently a consultant for a Mozambique government on ICT, Dr. Yaw Ameyaw from Ghana etc. I attended few thesis discussions and I must say ICT4D is a complicated and ambiguous topic than people think

ICTD LONDON 2010

While I was in Finland I made a scholarship application to attend a one week “ICTD LONDON 2010 “an ICT4D conference that was to be held at Royal Holloway University in London. My scholarship application to attend the conference was granted when I had come back to Kenya and was just preparing for my graduation which was to take place on 10^th of Dec 2010. The conference was to run from 12^th -16^th of Dec which means I had to leave the country earlier, like on 11^th latest a day after my graduation. Unfortunately I had issues with UK visa agency and time wasn’t on my side to appeal plus other complications that arose, therefore I dint make it to that conference.

ICT4D and Social Entrepreneurship course- Voices of Africa

During my three month stay in Finland, I enrolled for certificate level entrepreneurship course dubbed Innovation at North Karelia University of Applied Sciences (Finland). Actually I enrolled for this course not so much because I wanted to become an entrepreneur but because I saw some of the exchange students enroll for it and since I dint want to be left behind, I had to follow suit, not knowing how important it would prove to be in my line of work.

Being a member of ICT4D facebook group, I met this lovely Lady, founder and managing Director of an NGO called Voices of Africa who apparently wanted to roll out an ICT4D and social entrepreneurship course in Webuye (Western Kenya) and having experience in this field, she sort my help in restructuring the course so I joined her team as ICT4D coordinator and training facilitator. On 7^th of February this year, I left Nairobi to go and teach the course in Webuye, one of a kind in Kenya. The Webuye course was a pilot project, we had an overwhelming response and so we had to replicate the project. So to give it more weight, our organization (Voicesofafrica.org) partnered with Accent Kenya and African Nazarene University to enable us use their lecture halls and facilities and also to help in overseeing the quality of delivery and the academic rigor that goes into the training and to accredit the course.

The course was officially launched on 11^th of March of 2011. The  launch was attended by different key personalities in the ICT sector among  them Dr. Leah T. Marangu, Vice Chancellor, Africa Nazarene University, Kai Wulff, Chief Evangelist, Plexus Group (founder and former CEO KDN), Jerry Xie, Deputy Director, Huawei Kenya, Hanif Kassam, Director, Intersat, Ltd among others.

 Currently we offer a certificate level ICT4D and Social entrepreneurship course at African Nazarene University Ngong road campus in Nairobi, and I am the lead ICT4D training facilitator, we do hope to see the course grow into a diploma and a degree level course.

N/B I may not know clearly at the moment the path my career is going to take, but one thing that I know for sure is that ICT4D is going to be a major determining factor.

ICTs and THE MARGINALIZED

In one of my classes I visited the infamous Bill gates statement “medicines and not computers are of use to the world’s poorest people,” and also the controversial question ‘bread or computers for the poor?’ I asked my students those questions; most of them felt that the poor need the basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter more than they need the computers (ICTs) which they termed as a luxury.

To help us understand the importance of ICTs for development, let us have a brief look at the key dimensions of ICT4D that is Knowledge and Communication for development (K4D and C4D)

Most people are poor because they suffer from information impoverishment, Knowledge is power, power that can enable one to ascend to greater heights and lack thereof is detrimental to development. Access to information is vital, but mere access to information in a narrow approach will not automatically lead to poverty reduction. It has to be embedded in a broader context of knowledge. Access to relevant information and knowledge is thus crucial for empowerment and development and to be effective it has to be linked to the particular situation, needs and demands of the people concerned. Thus local knowledge is vital.

Internet is the greatest source of information that we have in the 21^st century, but whose importance has not been fully realized by the majority of the poor and the marginalized, most of them do not even know what it means. This reminds me of a scenario that I encountered not so long ago, I had just moved to this new house and found this wonderful lady (I gauze she was in her mid thirties) who was to orient me on my new surrounding, so I asked her whether there was internet connection in the house, surprisingly and not knowing what she was looking for, she searched the whole house only to come back and tell me that she did not find it but she suspected that the previous occupant had gone with it! This story is not so different from the one I witnessed with some of my students, I had asked them to find the MDGs from the internet, most of them couldn’t this is because they haven’t used internet before to search for information save for chatting on facebook, this is astonishing but it is the stark reality on the ground! The majority of the population (the poor) do not know how to use these tools to better their lives and this further increases social divides, widens the gap between rich and poor countries, regions, indi­viduals and even between men and women.

Other than knowledge, people-centered communication is also very important; under communication we have Voice which facilitates broad participation in democratic processes, good governance, cultural diversity and local content and Networking to facilitate effective communication and cooperation among people and organizations

Using, producing and sharing knowledge requires effective communication at all levels. Information and communication technology provides a broad range of powerful tools to enhance both the knowledge and communication dimensions of development

For the poor, the real issue is not whether ICT are desirable because the technology is already part of their broader con­text. The issue is whether we accept that the poor should, in addition to the existing deprivation of income, food and health service, etc., also be further deprived of new oppor­tunities to improve their livelihood. The strategic choice is whether to accept the rapidly growing gap caused by a very asymmetric architecture of opportunities or whether to use ICT in a creative manner to level the playing field in economic, social, cultural and political terms

Today we have the hindsight to ask questions like, how can internet be useful to people who cannot read or write? Does it make sense to provide computers to village schools where there are no teachers? Is access to technology financially sustainable? Even if villagers do learn how to use the computer and get a web browser open, where will they go? Which meaningful sites will they visit? Where is the content? Is it local?

A lot of funding has gone to many ICT4D projects, projects that were started with a view to help the poor leapfrog from poverty to wealth, some of them have in one way or the other achieved their objectives, but majority of the projects haven’t, which begs the question why?? Why has most ICT4D projects failed? And what lessons can we learn from the successful ones?

Many books have been written; many papers and articles published on ICT4D, but why are we not there yet? No doubt progress have been made on how to use ICT for development but the pace is a bit slow, maybe too slow.

This could be due to the fact that the marginalized and the poor are sidelined or are not fully incorporated in the implementation process and/or they are left out, or have no idea how to use these ICTs to empower themselves. And this is where the main challenge lies; this in my view is the missing part of the equation, the lost piece of the puzzle- grassroots’ education, the neglected base of the pyramid – most projects I feel engage those who already have the knowhow but leave out the targeted audience and for this to be reversed, most organizations should go down to the grassroots level and teach and educate these people on how to use these tools for development and to empower themselves, because it is at the grassroots level where empowerment ought to start, it is good for instance to develop an awesome software that can help farmers to access market prices but it would not achieve its intended objective if the farmers themselves are not taught how to use the said software, or to provide internet access to schools and not teach those students how to access information from the internet.

To make ICT work for poverty reduction and development, it needs both affordable, market-driven infra­structure and multi-stakeholder efforts at all levels to help poor, disadvantaged and marginalized people use the whole range of ICT according to their priorities and demands.

References:

·         1.Start up and change the world by S.Deve Appanah and Sunit Shrestha

·         2.  ICT4D – Connecting People for a Better World edited by Weigel, G., Waldburger, D.