bright simons stopped perusing academic career just because he wanted to work in technology and do something &39practical&39 in that field. now the entire glob is adopting his system. before being africa&39s most dynamic technology innovators, bright simons was an astrophysicist. bright got a scholarship from durham university. however, in the end, he decided that it was not adequately practical. he says that he was an active member in student politics and he had this idea that he could help to change things. instead he turned to migration studies, getting another eu scholarship he decided that he really wanted to help refugees. however, he felt that even that was not practical enough. to effectively change the things, he realized that he would have to come back to ghana and build his own venture. he realized that he needed to be an industrialist, and he had no money. so he needed to find vicinity where he could make an impact without spending a lot of money and that is where technology made an exception. his big understanding was that the best investment in technical infrastructure in africa was deriving from mobile telecom companies. they&39d already spent a big amount of money. the only thing which was required was a good concept to encourage them to give you access to this infrastructure. the great idea he came up with was to address the issue of fake medicines. fake pharmaceuticals and pills are a huge problem in the developing countries. the world health organization anticipates that, of all medicines on sale, they account for 30. more serious than that, these medicines daily kill up to 2,000 people worldwide, though few more studies suggest the number is even bigger. the idea of simons was to put a code on kinds of packaging, letting consumers to see if it was genuine or not with a plain text message. mpedigree, his organization, now works along with around 20 telecoms organizations and is in discussions with around two dozen more. its structure has appeared on 6.5m packs of medicine and been adopted as the nationwide standard in three different nations. perhaps, most exciting, is that the arrangement is now being taken outside africa. it&39s become a model for the field in india as well as is being extensive throughout south asia. simons says that perhaps it is for the first time that innovations from africa are spreading in the other parts of the world. it is changing the traditional story regarding the continent as well as emphasizing that africa can be the source of novel innovations. this is a genuine reversal of the common narrative. simons is optimistic that it&39s just the beginning. he believes, innovation, has the capability to bring a change into africa. simon further said that it&39s not going to be regarding shiny gimmickry as it a lot is in the west. it will be regarding innovation that has an influence on human lives. the example of simons has proved that it is not impossible. mpedigree has had an amazing amount of achievement with extremely little resources. simons says that studying in the uk has given him the assurance that entrepreneurs can bring change into the society. but the studies in abroad have also made it obvious for him how africa is sidelined on a global scale. it&39s what gave him with the desire to go back to the continent and overturn this narrative. he further mentions that it hasn&39t been easy going. the conventional stereotypes regarding africa &ldquoabsolutely&rdquo still exist in the world. when the time came to approaching multinational companies, simons came across stiff battle to the idea that improvement could come from africa. he further mentions that there is almost no funding from institutions for innovation in africa. in africa, there&39s no aid money, no bank money. he continued further that "scale" is the greatest challenge. in africa, there are a billion people. the majority of african residents are young and they require jobs. therefore, there is a need to create the infrastructure to encourage productivity. this is not possible to do by microinterventions. africa needs better allocation of resources, leadership and new infrastructures. source of information httpwww.theguardian.comtechnology2012aug26newafricaghanaiantechinnovator
