We have schools but lack education. We want to study so we can be like you, in Africa. The deaths of Yaguine and Fode are poignant. But I am certain there are equally touching stories behind every death from hunger, disease or strife across the developing world. Millions of deaths, all poignant for the sorrow they evoke, tragic for the loss of human potential and completely unacceptable because these deaths did not have to happen.
Information means life.
I realized this in the mid-1980s after reading an article about how AIDS was spreading rapidly through Africa because the continent lacked infrastructure to alert people about the epidemic. Africans were not just dying of disease. They were dying of ignorance. I became convinced of the urgent need to create a platform to deliver information to vast areas efficiently, economically and practically. I do not love technology, and I most certainly do not love it for its own sake.