Eric Mibuari ‘06 was not discouraged by the few electrical outlets in the church room donated for the new Laare Community Technology Centre. He’d grown up in Laare, a hilly Kenyan area 200 miles north of Nairobi, so he knew that electricity was spotty. He also knew he would find no shortage of creative energy among community members and church elders. In fact, he soon had a local electrician adding outlets. And he knew he could count on the support of MIT faculty, administrators, and students. He had started the center in 2005 with an MIT Public Service Center fellowship and 12 used computers donated by MIT libraries.
An IT analyst at Citigroup in Boston, he knows the life-changing importance of education firsthand. “Seeing how much a good education has given me has inspired me to help others gain this advantage,” says Mibuari, whose parents struggled to send him and his five siblings to school in Kenya. “We have a lot of very talented kids who can benefit from exposure to even a fraction of the resources that are available in the United States.” With basic computer skills, “they can get jobs in the cities or run computer access points in their hometowns.”
Mibuari decided to start the technology center after working with MIT’s Africa Internet Technology Initiative (AITI) and Development Lab (D-Lab). Through AITI, he taught Java programming and entrepreneurship to undergraduates in Ethiopia. Through D-Lab, he helped establish a community-based radio station in Punjab, India. “My MIT education taught me how to bring diverse resources together to make things happen,” he says.
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