Making info cheap and available is his mission

Mr Noah Samara (in striped shirt) is made a Maasai elder in Kajiado County after he donated tablets to Olangata Wuas Primary School in the county in May last year. PHOTO | LUKORITO JONES

What you need to know:

  • Currently, Mr Samara is the chief executive officer  of Yazmi, a company he founded in 2009, which  uses satellite connectivity to distribute educational material to people in remote areas where broadband and Internet penetration is low.
  • In Kenya, Yazmi is currently working on a connectivity proposal to the Ministry of Information communication and Technology to ensure that the Jubilee government’s promise to equip primary pupils with tablets gets a cost-effective content updating and distribution system.
  • Mr Samara’s association with tablets goes a long way back. In fact, the technology expert believes that he was the first person to “prophesy” the advent of the smart phone long before the first such device ever hit the market.

Kevin O’leary, the investor in the popular TV series, Shark Tank, once said that businesses are designed to provide solutions that give returns to their shareholders, not to solve problems for communities. So it takes real selflessness for a business leader to defy that kind of logic and instead dedicate his whole  life to solving problems for millions of the underprivileged in the world.

Mr Noah Samara, an American entrepreneur with African roots, is one such individual. Since 1990, Mr Samara has engineered the investment of billions dollars in ventures that target people  in developing countries. Kenya is one of the countries that have benefited greatly from Mr Samara’s social entrepreneurship, and the man says he is just getting started.

The term visionary perhaps best describes the man who was born in Ethiopia 60 years ago. Samara’s  love for science and scholarship is evident from the fact that he is a qualified lawyer, historian and satellite specialist all rolled into one.

“My plan in life is to draw fire from the gods and grant it to men,” says the soft-spoken yet very eloquent Mr Samara. His statement infers to the titan, Prometheus who, in Greek mythology, stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to mankind, thus spurring humanity’s development.

Currently, Mr Samara is the chief executive officer  of Yazmi, a company he founded in 2009, which  uses satellite connectivity to distribute educational material to people in remote areas where broadband and Internet penetration is low.

“Yazmi provides a unique and highly cost-effective learning technology infrastructure for rural, remote, and underprivileged areas,” he explains.

The company, headquartered in the United States, has since partnered with governments, education ministries and private school operators in Africa, Asia and the Middle East to develop infrastructure through which educational material can be beamed to their pupils via satellite.

 “The Yazmi satellite is the world’s first satellite-to-tablet content delivery system. Our satellites cover more than 5 billion people in over 120 countries,” Mr Samara says with pride.

IMPRESSIVE TECHNOLOGY

In Kenya, Yazmi is currently working on a connectivity proposal to the Ministry of Information communication and Technology to ensure that the Jubilee government’s promise to equip primary pupils with tablets gets a cost-effective content updating and distribution system.

To see whether his digital learning would take root in Kenya, Mr Samara’s company, Yazmi, chose to pilot the programme in Kajiado County in May last year. In conjunction with the Ministry of Education and the Kajiado County Government, Mr Samara donated more than 100 tablets to Elangata Wuas Primary School.

“The locals, many of whom had never seen computers and tablets before, were so impressed with the new technology that they crowned Mr Samara a Maasai elder,” says Mr Jeremiah Lanoi, the head teacher of Elangata Wuas Primary School. “It has made learning fun, especially subjects like science and mathematics.”

 Mr Lanoi adds that since the introduction of Yazmi’s programme, class attendance has improved as pupils transfer from other schools to his school so that they can acquaint themselves with the electronic gadgets.

And in December last year, Mr Samara signed a contract on behalf of his company with the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops. The ground-breaking deal was the beginning of an association that could see close to two thousand schools in the country equipped with tablets and other e-learning infrastructure that use Yazmi’s satellite to access educational material.

Every man, Mr Samara seems to suggest, should spends his entire life working towards an ideal goal that  gives him self-fulfillment and actualisation. “I will not rest until I have delivered a tablet to every child in Africa,” he says determinedly

Mr Samara’s association with tablets goes a long way back. In fact, the technology expert believes that he was the first person to “prophesy” the advent of the smart phone long before the first such device ever hit the market. 

“When I was founding my first company, Worldspace, the initial application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had an accurate description of what is now referred to as a tablet. We had envisioned a scenario where a Kenyan girl cycles to the market carrying a small screen with her.

She later receives information that her grandmother is sick through the screen. As she cycles back to her grandmother’s place, she consults a doctor through the same screen to get information on how to help her grandmother. That was in 1990. The first tablet was not to be invented until 2006,” recalls the tech expert, who holds two doctorate degrees.

Mr Samara, who was born in Ethiopia, fled the country with his parents when the Marxist government came to power and settled in the UK, where he did his A Levels  before proceeding to East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, US. Throughout his studies, Samara kept the vision of one day coming back and helping rebuild Africa close to his heart. He would graduate from East Stroudsburg with a degree in English in 1978 and proceed to The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to study European Renaissance, in an effort to find out why Western countries were more culturally and economically advanced than African countries. It turned out to be an eye-opening experience.

PRINTING AGE

“While at UCLA, I discovered two major things which propelled European countries that African countries were missing. First, it was the existence of great European thinkers, scholars and writers such as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and Shakespeare, whose works were translated into  different languages and taught all over the continent. Africa had its thinkers too, but the lack of proper educational structures meant that we couldn’t author classics akin to the ones in Europe, so our knowledge was never spread or shared widely in the days of yore.

“Secondly, the invention of  printing was the real catalyst for Europe’s rise. By enabling the mass production of manuscripts at affordable costs, the printing press effectively democratised the availability of knowledge for the masses. Africans lacked this and were, therefore, trudging when it came to education and the spread of knowledge.”

This  realisation led Samara to vow to himself that he would strive to make Africa a continent with the best education levels, and where information would be  readily available to every child, man or woman who required it. This passion influenced his later decision to focus on space and satellite technology when he was studing law at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

“What holds our continent back is lack of organised information systems. The difference between us [Africans] and them [developed countries] lies in the delivery of information,” says the scholar, who also holds a Master’s degree in international business from Georgetown University.

“In the mid-1980s, I read something that changed my life. It was an article in The Washington Post about HIV/Aids in Africa and how it was spreading because millions of people either had no information or had the wrong information. It became clear to me that people weren’t simply dying of disease; they were dying of ignorance. Something had to be done. I came up with the idea of launching a satellite over Africa that would broadcast digital radio across the continent to inexpensive portable receivers,” Mr Samara reveals.

But becoming the first Black person to place a satellite in space, Mr Samara would later find out, was no walk in the park.

 “In 1990, I quit my job and devoted my body, mind and spirit to a quest that required securing international regulatory approval from 127 countries, designing a new communications system, building and launching satellites, establishing a corporation, hiring staff and raising capital to pay for it all,” he recalls.

Securing the funding to drive his vision was the hardest part, as he had to convince the world’s richest people to have faith in Africa. He needed a total of $1.5 billion (Sh154.5bn) to make his vision work. At the age of 34, Mr Samara became the founder and chief executive of the internationally known WorldSpace.

Notably, Mr Samara was able to raise more than $1.8 billion and in 1998 he launched Afristar, the first satellite dedicated to Africa. He would later launch more satellites to cover the developing nations in America and Asia. The satellite network, which was the first in the world that could broadcast radio content, provided gap-free coverage to areas where radio wave signals were not accessible.

Unfortunately, WorldSpace was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2008. Mr Samara has since launched Yazmi Inc. in the US, which claims to have built the first satellite-to-tablet content delivery system that is used by more than a billion students across the globe without the need for Internet or electricity.

“As Africans, we should not be afraid of thinking big. After all, reality is only an extension of our imagination,” says  the man who has lived as an illustrious life as a lawyer, entrepreneur, telecommunications guru, inventor and philosopher.

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PROSPEROUS AFRICA 

Students of Elangata Wuas Primary School in Kajiado the laptops donated to them by Yazmi CEO Noah Samara. PHOTO | SILA KIPLAGAT

Long-held dream of a better Africa 

MR NOAH SAMARA was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1956 to a Sudanese father and an Ethiopian mother.

“When I was growing up, most countries in Africa were just gaining independence. It was a time that held great hope for the African continent,” he says.

Mr Samara’s father took up a job as a financial attaché with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) when it was formed in 1963. He recalls how, when he was six, his father took him to witness the inaugural ceremony of the pan-African organisation.

 “All the founding fathers of African nations were present and I watched as they planted trees to signify a new beginning for the continent. I interacted with the likes of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Though I was too young to fully understand the significance of the occasion, I knew something incredible was unfolding for Africa,” he recounts.

AFRICAN STORY

Later on, however, the OAU found itself helpless as civil wars broke out across the continent in  Nigeria and Egypt, among other African countries.

He says of the experience: “I listened to my father’s radio every night and I could tell that the dream of  a prosperous Africa was fast dying. Every day we’d hear about assassinations, unrests and coups.”

The political upheavals finally hit Ethiopia, and Mr Samara’s family had to flee when he was a teenager. They settled in the United Kingdom, where Samara enrolled at an English boarding school for his A levels. Being the only Black student in his school, he felt isolated and withdrew into his shell.

“I was always clarifying to people that in Africa we actually had houses and cars and we did not live on trees and hunt for a living as many Europeans at the time thought. Due to lack of information, they genuinely thought that Africa was dirt poor,” he says. It was this perception that made Samara resolve to work hard and always top his class.

“I wanted to erase the image they had of Africa and I thought that being the brightest student in the school would help. I would always wake up at 4am, an hour earlier than my schoolmates and devote my time to study. Waking up early is a habit I have carried with me all my life.”

Because he mostly kept to himself. The young Samara immersed himself in literature, and  English turned out to be his favourite subject.

“I resolved to read all the works by the past literature Nobel laureates, and I would say this is a decision that has made me the man I am today,” says the man whose favourite books are Crime and Punishment by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Petals of Blood by Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o.