In the World: Fostering entrepreneurship in developing nations
In 2000, three African undergraduates at MIT, inspired by their experience with MIT’s LeaderShape leadership training program, founded an organization whose goal was to give students in the developing world the programming skills to create locally relevant e-commerce applications. After graduating that spring, two of the students — Paul Njoroge and Martin Mbaya — returned to their native Kenya, along with a fellow alumnus and a graduate student in linguistics, to conduct a six-week course on Java and Linux for 45 undergraduates at Nairobi’s Strathmore University.In the 11 years since, the organization, Accelerating Information Technology Innovation (AITI), has sent more than 120 MIT students to seven countries — six in Africa, plus Sri Lanka — to train more than 1,500 undergraduates. AITI courses have also spawned a host of mobile-Web startups, including HeHe, which created a car-sharing application and has contracts with both the Rwandan government and with MTN, a...