Mekitmfon: Innovation Doesn’t Have to Be Digital

He was supposed to be a doctor.

“Life got real,” Mekitmfon Herbert Awakessien says, in the flat, amused tone of a man who has told this story before. “My fingers touched the keyboard, and they never wanted to touch an injection or a test tube again.”

That single swerve from medicine to computer science is the smallest of the redirections in his career, and the only one that looks like a straight line in hindsight. Everything after it has been a deliberate refusal to stay in the lane he was handed: the graduate who skipped the graduate trainee ladder, the ICT prizewinner who postponed his startup, the digital innovator who will tell you, without flinching, that the most important innovation Nigeria ever lost was a machine for pounding yam.

Growing up among adults

Mekitmfon grew up in what he calls an ethnic minority community in Akwa Ibom State, then moved to Abuja somewhere between the ages of 7 and 10. The move rearranged his sense and views about his country, as did his position in his family.

“I am the second-born of two (the lastborn). My elder brother is thirteen years older than me. The people I grew up around were mostly adults, which caused me to mature more quickly than my peers.

The consequence was a child who was paying attention. “I wasn’t just being mindless like my peers. I was very aware of the details, the affairs of my community, and the norms. He knew, early, what was broken in Nigeria – early enough that by secondary school he had made a decision that reads like a mission statement written by a teenager and is honoured by the adult: stop talking about the problem and start being part of the solution.

There was a second influence, quieter and closer. His mother worked with the National Youth Service Corps, which meant a childhood spent in and around NYSC camps, watching corps members hand over a year of their lives to the country. “Seeing how corps members had to devote their time giving back to the nation” – that, he says, is the soil the rest grew in.

The volunteer’s shortcut

Fresh out of Adeleke University, decorated as his institution’s most distinguished ICT personality, Mekitmfon had a plan to start a company, which he put on hold. Instead, during his NYSC year, he took a volunteering role with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) Nigeria, an opportunity passed to him by Kingsley Udo, the youth programmes manager, who happened to have been one of his mother’s students over two decades before.

The first project was a back-to-school campaign: using technology both for advocacy and to build systems that could raise the funds to return children to classrooms. It worked. And it rewired him.

“Just imagine that energy being overturned with that zeal for social impact to actually impact other people’s lives. That was the turning point.”

It also turned out to be a career accelerant that no job application could have matched. “Volunteering immediately after university was the best decision I ever made.” It gave me a quantum leap. I did not have to go through the internship, the graduate trainee, or the associate role. I was already working with the people in these fields. So when there was an opening, I was available because I was a volunteer. I did not necessarily have the full qualification, but when it came to actually doing the job, I was able to deliver.”

By 2021 he was already in top management in the nonprofit sector, years ahead of the standard schedule.

Three months in Ilesha

In 2017, VSO’s International Citizen Service programme paired Nigerian volunteers with British volunteers and placed them in rural communities for three months. Mekitmfon’s posting was in Igangan, Ilesha, in Osun State; his team’s brief was sustainable livelihoods. His UK counterpart, Dan, arrived from the UK with a briefing from the UK that told UK volunteers to avoid bringing their best clothes or gadgets due to theft risk and their perceived lack of understanding of such systems, and then found himself sharing a room with a Nigerian who was a tech expert and managed the team’s media and technology needs, such as designing the team’s slides and building its website.

“He was so shocked that he could meet a Nigerian who was so technically educated,” Mekitmfon says. He spent a good part of those three months quietly reorienting his colleagues. His observation cuts both ways, and he offers it without resentment: some things Nigerians are graded on, the British simply inherit. “It’s a result of the privilege associated with being born in a particular location. Nevertheless, I still appreciate the process we in Africa have to go through. That rigorous process is what shapes us; it shapes our resilience.”

There’s a specific version of that resilience he can name from memory: strikes, absent lecturers, and a syllabus you teach yourself. “You have to be your own teacher, and you have to also pass. You have to teach yourself so well that you are as knowledgeable as the teacher to be able to pass their exams.”

But the more profound thing he brought back from the village was not about technology at all. It was communication, the discovery that speaking across cultural contexts is itself a technical skill, and the fact that he had been doing it badly. His favourite example is deceptively small:

Back then I learnt that asking someone, “How was your night?” was wrong. If you’re asking someone who is not from your own cultural context, the answer you might get is, “My night is none of your business.” The reason you’re asking is that you want to know if the person slept well. So ask about the sleep. “Hope you slept well.”

Treat that as a formula, he says, and it generalises: know what you want to ask, and specifically ask about it. He applies it to conversations, to ideas, to pitches, to policy.

What he saw in Ilesha also put him at the founding of the Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative (AREAi), built with his friend Gideon. He has never been its public face. “I have been behind the scenes from the beginning building and managing the organisation’s digital infrastructure, right from the start, before the fame and the glory.” This year he stepped off the board deliberately, “to allow room for new and fresh people and more ideas”, and stayed on as a consultant to its technology council. He watches with a sense of parental pride as the organisation he helped establish transforms from an education-policy body into an edtech organisation.

Digitising an analogue continent

At the African Union’s Department of Economic Development, Trade, Tourism, Industry and Minerals, a role he has since stepped away from, in pursuit of a new focus, Mekitmfon’s work was to build the digital plumbing under the continent’s commercial ambitions.

The centrepiece was an SME intelligence platform: an attempt to document Africa’s MSMEs at scale in order to know, concretely, what their pain points and strengths are, and to feed that into the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Alongside it came systems supporting Agenda 2063 and the unglamorous but decisive work of automating institutional events, the MSME Forum, and African Industrialisation Week (AIW) so that they generated data that led to actions instead of just goodwill.

“For a system that has mostly been analogue for a long time, my role was to create systems that automated processes and gathered data and information and then see how we translate that data into policy decisions and actions to make Africa marketable not just within Africa but to the world.”

“We have lost the identity of defining technology in our own context.”

Ask Mekitmfon what technology is, and he will cite a Bollywood film. In 3 Idiots, a student defines technology to his professor by pointing at a zipper. The scene has stayed with him for years, because it names the thing he thinks Africa’s innovation economy has forgotten.

“Innovation doesn’t have to be digital. Sometimes, innovation involves doing the same thing as everyone else but in a different way to achieve better results. That is innovation. You don’t have to take it to the internet.”

This perspective leads to his central argument, which he has been developing for a decade. He wanted to study digital development at the University of Manchester, one of the few institutions in the world that teaches it properly. He couldn’t afford it, and the scholarships didn’t come. So he did the next thing: he found the professor. He read Richard Heeks’s publications, worked through the whole ICT4D blog, watched the talks, and built the curriculum himself. (He is only now, more than ten years after graduating, doing his master’s.)

What he took from it is a question rather than an answer: development according to whom?

“For some communities, development does not mean having access to the internet. For them, development could mean a good road to move people and goods in and out of the community, thereby giving them larger market access and, in the long run, improving their purchasing power.”

He makes the same case about education, which he knows from the inside. Nigeria is full of informal education that works and doesn’t count: the Eastern apprenticeship system, where a young person learns mathematics, language, mechanics, procurement and margin without ever entering a classroom. “That is also education. However, this type of education is not measurable by current standards until TVET, which is now spreading across the continent, began assigning assessable value to vocational skills.

The empty chair in the AI conversation

In June, Mekitmfon was in Geneva speaking on Closing the Governance Gap: African Perspectives on Inclusive AI Frameworks for International Peace and Security. His pitch to the global audience was blunt.

“Many decisions that would affect Africa are being made about AI security and AI safety, but Africa is not represented at the decision table. We are not even present at the locations where the data is being trained.”

He does not leave that abstract. Picture an AI policing system trained on one demographic and deployed in another: “Imagine a cultural festival in Africa where we do a lot of cultural festivity with lots of energy. An AI policing system is going to mark that as a threat, seeing as masquerades are jumping and hitting the ground; meanwhile, that is just culture. “Ask some systems to show you a doctor in Africa, and you receive an image of a hospital with an international NGO flag on it. Ask for a native doctor and you get Native Americans in ceremonial dress. “We must ensure that the system includes our data during its training.”

Regarding the impact of AI on development work over the next decade, he is careful to maintain a balanced perspective. Used right, it improves systems: pattern detection, climate and migration modelling from satellite data, faster humanitarian response at a moment when humanitarian budgets are shrinking and everyone must do more with less. “If used right, it’s a great servant.”

And if not moderated? “AI is a very, very terrible weapon.” Not a master but rather a weapon. “Because people are the ones using it.”

His real worry isn’t the machinery. It’s cognition.

“The greatest thing it’s going to affect is how people think and how people respond. Every problem now seems like it has a technology response/solution.”

He lists the consequences he can already see: people are turning to chatbots for mental health and emotional support because these services are readily available, which creates “a huge disconnection”. Real events are dismissed as AI fabrications because the technology is now adequate enough to make deniability free. False positives in systems where a false positive can cost lives are particularly concerning; for example, “Imagine a missile-targeting system run by AI.” The general dependency on AI has become so severe that even speeches are no longer written by people.

His verdict on the industry’s favourite remedy is the best line of the interview: “Responsible use is like handing a kid a gun – and then, after he has felt the energy from pulling the trigger, you are now trying to teach him responsible use.”

The yam pounder

If you want the shortest route into how Mekitmfon thinks, ask him what he’d tell a young African who wants to use technology for impact but doesn’t know where to begin. He gives a three-word pathway – learn, practise, and institutionalise – and then, before explaining it, detours into a story about yam.

Years ago, he says, a Nigerian invention for pounding yams was taken to the Nigerian government and shrugged off. What is wrong with pounding by hand? The idea went abroad. It came back as an imported food processor, and Nigerian households bought it in bulk.

“That’s one of the most heartbreaking stories about how technology lost its essence and value in Nigeria. People thought back then that people would still be pounding yam. Now people are not bothered about pounding yam; they want to eat pounded yam.”

The moral is his definition, stated plainly: “Technology is not about IT. It’s not about web-based systems. Can you create a better yam pounder? A faster and safer way to move people? A way people can create electricity without spending so much? The broom is technology. Technology is anything, any system you put in place to make people’s lives better.”

So, Learn – the material is everywhere, and it is not only about building web solutions. Practise – which for him means volunteering and interning, the thing that gave him his own quantum leap. Institutionalise – find an organisation doing what you care about and get inside it. “You have access to their tools, their equipment, their processes, and their wealth of knowledge of how they have stayed afloat over the years.”

Three mandates and a legacy

Given the power to redesign one part of Africa’s digital ecosystem from scratch, Mekitmfon goes straight to money.

He’d been in Europe the week before we spoke, spending the same euro in Germany that works in Switzerland. Africa, by contrast, routes its trade through someone else’s currency. “What we lack in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea has plenty. What’s the challenge? Currency. We have to change to dollars before changing to the currency in Equatorial Guinea, or Ethiopia, or Uganda.” Even aid arrives and sits in foreign denominations. It’s almost like our central bank is not based in Africa. Whatever actions are taken, they improve the economy of that particular currency.

If he led the African Union, he would have three mandates; the first would be the free movement of people and goods, and the second, monetary interoperability. The reasoning is the European Union’s, borrowed without embarrassment: anyone who is keen to do business with a member state negotiates with the bloc. “They are negotiating on a larger scale.” Most African nations, he says, still try to grow independently, and personal interest keeps getting in the way of policy.

The third thing on his list is access: internet and IT literacy in the many places that still have neither. “Despite the high adoption of technology in Africa, we have so many unreached areas. I have seen this issue in several countries, and I feel like we need to do better.”

He has moved through sustainable livelihoods, education, and economic development and is now heading into peace and security. “I feel like this might be my last bus stop. I don’t know yet.”

Asked what he wants said about him in twenty years, he doesn’t reach for the projects.

“I helped change the way they think or the way they went about life. Life is a factor of our thoughts: what we take in, what we process, what we give out.”

He is thinking, when he says it, of a speaker he once heard and never met, whose talk redirected him. And of the label he wants retired.

“I saw this person’s resilience. I saw the way he kept pushing to ensure things were done right, that Africa was being put first. That I wasn’t just being a Nigerian, I wasn’t just being a guy from Akwa Ibom; I was being African.”

Mekitmfon Herbert Awakessien is a digital innovator working at the intersection of technology, systems thinking and digital development. He is a founding infrastructure lead and technology council consultant at the Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative (AREAi), and previously built digital solutions for MSMEs and AfCFTA implementation at the African Union’s Department of Economic Development, Trade, Tourism, Industry and Minerals.
He currently leads Crempact Digital Solutions and is the Director, Digital Learning and Innovation at Africa’s Future Economic Leaders (AFEL).