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| Chidube Ezeozue |
To ensure the achievement of his goals, the Nanka, Orumba North Local Government Area of Anambra State-born graduate knew he needed more education and international exposure. With little or no resources, he started looking for scholarship. His efforts paid off as he won a fellowship from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Legatum Centre for Development and Entrepreneurship as well as a Research Assistantship from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
And because he grew up frustrated by epileptic power supply — like many other Nigerians — Ezeozue, who completed his secondary school education at King’s College, Lagos, in 2002, after his primary education at Delta Steel Company Model Primary School 1, Aladja, Warri, Delta State in 1996, was determined to contribute his quota to the elimination of epileptic energy supply in the country.
Ezeozue, who is pursuing dual Master’s degrees in MIT’s Technology and Policy Programme and in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has created an app, with his brother, that crowd-sources information about Nigerian power outages.
With the app called NepaSituation, Nigerians can report outages. This data, when merged into an algorithm developed by Ezeozue, can help Nigerians predict when power outages may strike their neighbourhoods, and how long those outages might last.
“With over 100 million cell phones in Nigeria, we knew it was an important resource we could tap into,” Ezeozue tells the MIT News.
“It took a while to come up with this algorithm, because the outages are pretty randomised, and the app is only as good as the number of people who enter outage data.”
But Ezeozue has delved into more than just tracking the problem: He is also working to address Nigeria’s chronic energy shortage.
“I started a company that is working to provide solar electricity to businesses and families at zero upfront cost,” Ezeozue says. The company, SolarKobo, was recently funded by a seed grant from MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, where Ezeozue is a fellow.
“Solar resources are abundantly available in Nigeria. The adoption of solar is only hindered by the high upfront cost. SolarKobo will enable access to solar energy by bearing this high upfront cost and charging a more palatable monthly fee.”
Though he admits that Nigeria’s electricity supply is also challenged by transmission and distribution, he says SolarKobo will bypass those transmission and distribution issues by putting the electricity utility on customers’ roofs.
“Nigeria has plenty of solar energy available. For as low as $25 a month, we can make this resource available to those who are interested,” Ezeozue adds.
Ezeozue is also passionate about education. Along with other Nigerian students at MIT, he has started two initiatives to encourage students in Nigeria to pursue higher education outside the country.
In one of these initiatives, which is aimed at secondary school pupils, Ezeozue and Chika Ugboh, an MIT chemical engineering student, bought preparatory materials and paid for a few students in one Nigerian school to take the SAT. While this pilot scheme, which was launched in 2011, was not an unequivocal success, Ezeozue says, “We learnt that simply providing the materials isn’t enough — it has to be accompanied by mentoring and training.” He and Ugboh are now working to assess how these Nigerian students learn best.
The second of these initiatives is aimed at Nigerian undergraduates. Working through their own networks in Nigeria, Ezeozue and other MIT graduate students are encouraging Nigerian undergraduates who might be interested in postgraduate study abroad.
But what is the motivation for these initiatives? He says, “I am driven by a belief that many brilliant Nigerians want to make Nigeria work. What many of these people need is some exposure and, perhaps, the credibility that a degree from, say, Harvard or MIT provides.
“Every day, this belief is confirmed by all the amazing Nigerians I meet here, with great ideas for things to do and things they are doing back home to build a better Nigeria. Also, highly-educated Nigerians going back home to serve, like Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, serve as additional inspiration. Finally, I can see the transformation I desire happen in other countries with similar foreign-educated citizens: South Korea, Pakistan, India, Indonesia and their “Berkeley Mafia”, Chile and their “Chicago Boys.”
The goal, he adds, is to build a generation of highly educated Nigerians who will, hopefully, go back to build a better Nigeria,” Ezeozue says.
But will he come back to Nigeria after the completion of his programme? He says, “I plan to eventually return to Nigeria.”
For now, after graduating from MIT in June, Ezeozue will remain in Cambridge, working as a software engineer for Google. Asked to identify the missing link between Nigerian university system and MIT, he says, “The course work is not as rigorous back home as it is here. Here, the professors use a barrage of assignments, quizzes, projects and examinations to ensure the material is learn thoroughly. They find a way to keep you constantly busy, even with as few classes as two in a semester.
“Specifically, in engineering, there is a heavy emphasis on the mathematical foundations of the course material. To be honest, I also think we spent a lot of time learning things that were not directly useful for our chosen courses. I’m still a little pained about all the time I spent in chemistry, other engineering disciplines (than my chosen electrical engineering), the humanities and social sciences classes.
“There may be an argument for a well-rounded graduate, but anything we don’t use, we forget. So, that time may have been better spent gaining depth in our actual courses of study. I think the curriculum may be a little too inflexible.
“Outside the classroom, the university here also provides students the confidence to believe that they can do whatever they set their minds to (from entrepreneurship, to hacking technology and public service) as well as resources (advice, opportunities to network, access to labs and tools as well as some financial resources) to bring ideas to fruition.”
But in spite of the negative things he notes about Nigerian university system, Ezeozue says it is easier for a hard-working person to gain confidence in a Nigerian university, as opposed to MIT.
At MIT, he says, there is such a high concentration of exceedingly brilliant, hard-working and ambitious people that even smart people lose confidence and constantly question their ability and their place here.
“But in Nigeria, I also gained a clear perspective and appreciation of the problems we face, as well as pragmatism about how to go about solving them (some naive solutions that may work elsewhere can be hard to implement in Nigeria). Additionally, in Nigeria, I built a network of similarly-driven people, many of whom are back home and whom I constantly rely on for the things I am working on.
“At UNN, I met a number of smart, hardworking software engineers who encouraged me to learn software engineering, a skill I constantly draw on, even in my research and education at MIT. They also started a now-successful company after they graduated and gave me my first job, where I saw first-hand that entrepreneurship does work,” he says.
But he thinks Nigeria’s greatest challenges are energy and education. From outside the government, he says, it is easy to identify quick solutions to these problems.
“However, I must caveat these ideas by saying that I understand that things inside the government are rarely what they seem to be from the outside. That said, for energy, I think privatisation is the way to go, provided the infrastructure and licences to build are sold to credible companies, even if they are foreign, and these companies would be given a relatively corruption-free environment to operate in,” he says.
Ezeozue cites the success recorded so far by the privatisation of the nation’s mobile industry, adding that privatisation will lead to the production of cheap energy supply.
To raise the standard of education in the country, Ezeozue advises that lecturer’s salaries should be raised to the point where teaching becomes an attractive proposition for the smartest graduates.
“Many of the smartest Nigerians I know will like to teach, but the universities cannot compete with what these people will earn outside. Alternatively, perhaps we need to work out a system where people from the industry can volunteer time at local universities and teach. At the pre-tertiary level, I applaud the NYSC’s direction of making everyone serve in schools.”
The fruits of these steps, he says, may not be immediately obvious, but he advises the NYSC to stick with this policy and improve enforcement.
This, he notes, will help address staffing inadequacies at that level of education.
But when exactly is he returning to Nigeria? Ezeozue says, “I can’t really say. It is difficult to secure in Nigeria the kind of capital we need to make SolarKobo a success. So, I’ll play it by the ear on this one. Google is an amazing place to work and gain experience and I will do that while channelling some of my earnings there to fund SolarKobo. Fortunately, I have co-founders who are on the ground in Nigeria to bootstrap the company and when the time is right to move back and do this full-time, I will.”
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