Entrepreneur Brings the Internet, Health and Hope to The Gambia

Source America.gov

Washington — A youth who grew up in The Gambia, a sliver of a country in West Africa, left home at age 16, a few months after his mother died, to study in Great Britain, and came back six years later with a degree in electrical engineering and a dream to enable his young compatriots to acquire higher education without having to leave home.

“Going to college meant that I had to grow up real fast,” Papa Yusupha Njie said. “The loss actually motivated me, and I never looked back. I made sure that I left the United Kingdom with excellent grades and honors degrees in electrical engineering and management.”

Njie’s academic credentials enabled him to land a secure, comfortable job as head of the information technology unit of the National Water and Electricity Company after his return to The Gambia. He stayed two years in that job. By 2000, he no longer could repress his entrepreneurial and humanitarian ambitions. He sold his car, persuaded several friends to lend him money and convinced a banker to grant him an overdraft allowance of $2,500. “Venture capital is unheard of in our part of the world,” Njie said.

Njie used the money he borrowed to open a cybercafé.

“People were shocked when I left my job,” he said. “There was no guarantee that I would succeed. There were other players in the market with deeper pockets. The norm was for people to work at one place till retirement with a salary guaranteed, company car, a good retirement package and other benefits.”

Njie used his cybercafé as an Internet training center for youths, holding intensive camps in the summer, when students were on break. “We had passion. We felt we knew a few things about technology that could make a difference in people’s lives,” Njie said.

The café’s camps ran four to six weeks and trained young people in Web design and hosting, printing, and computer repair and maintenance. Young people learned to use search engines to find schools, scholarships and, of course, friends. The cybercafé, in addition, provided a place to educate young people about the danger of HIV/AIDS. “We produced and filmed the first HIV/AIDS documentary on The Gambia, which was broadcast on national television,” Njie said.

Through the cybercafé, Njie launched Unique Solutions, a full-service information and communications technology company. Unique Solutions is building a wireless network that extends throughout The Gambia. For his efforts, Njie was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2006 by The Gambia Chamber of Commerce and Industry and two years later was nominated as Business Man of the Year 2008. He will come to Washington April 26 to be a delegate to the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.

Njie’s vision for Unique Solutions is for it to become the first private Internet service provider that extends to every rural and urban area in the country. He feels that his decision to pursue the life of an entrepreneur in his homeland was the right one.

“Coming back home, I am one of a chosen few who have the opportunity to share my skills and knowledge with my community, and the entrepreneur in me tells me that, yes, I can make money doing it,” he said.