Tuesday May 23, 2017
By BONNIE CHRISTIAN
The 2017 TED Fellows will speak at the TEDGlobal event in Arusha, Tanzania in August
Abdigani Diriye / Credit: TED
An inventor and advocate for tech innovation and research in Africa, a French solar storm scientist and a digital activist are among the 2017 class of TED Fellows.
Abdigani Diriye is a Somali computer scientist driving the narrative that surrounds Somalia and Somaliland towards a technology and innovation focus. Diriye’s family fled during the chaos of Somalia’s civil war nearly 30 years ago. He made it to the United Kingdom where he studied for a bachelor's degree, a masters and a PhD in computer science at the University of London.
Now, at 32 years old, Diriye works as a research scientist at IBM to help develop fintech for people in Africa. In 2012 he returned home, co-founding Innovate Ventures, a startup accelerator and technology fund in Somalia.
Innovation Ventures has grown from being a coding camp to an incubator and accelerator with partners such as Oxfam, giving small amounts of seed investment from anywhere between $1,000 to $10,000.
“When I started there wasn’t a whole heap of understanding around what I was doing,” Diriye told WIRED. "Focusing on technology and innovation when basic issues around health care or sustenance has always raised a question mark. My argument has always been that the world is heading towards an information economy – we’re in the midst of an industrial revolution – and so, for the country to progress and move forward, this would have to be a pillar; innovation and technology would have to be instrumental”.
When the company was in its initial stages, Diriye was teaching a coding class in Somalia. Access to the internet was so poor that downloading a 100Mb development platform for coding was nearly impossible. In the past five years, local mindsets are changing and people are becoming more proactive and self-driven.
“This has just been so gratifying for my role, I think with the developments I’ve pretty much put myself out of a job,” he explains. “There is real culture now of focusing on technology and startups. There’s no way I can say we did all of that but I think we contributed a small part”.
Abdigani Diriye / Credit: TED
This will be the topic of his TED talk in August in Arush, Tanzania; where the Somali tech scene is, how he has contributed and how others can contribute and persevere to have a small impact.
The TED Fellows program brings young innovators together from across the world where they are able to participate in a future TEDor TEDGlobal conference.
This year's other Fellows include digital rights activist, Nighat Dadfrom Pakistan, UK scientist Victoria Forster who is researching new treatments for pediatric cancer, and Miho Janvier, a French astrophysicist who works to predict space weather by studying the nature of solar flames.