The Vim Views & Versions - Blogs of a MIghTy African

Sometime in Q1 2025, my work colleague Richard Mawuko Duttey told me about Jobberman doing features on people around work, etc. He is a big fan of Jobberman, he pretty much got to work for Kosmos Innovation Center thanks to this African built workforce platform. I joined him one fine day to Jobberman's office, hidden somewhere in the central parts of Accra where their comms team recorded a video. I am honored to have been featured by Jobberman in their Time With The Experts series. I remember Jobberman 's early years. I was following them from the Bay Area when it was founded in August 2009 by Olalekan Olude, Ayodeji Adewunmi and Opeyemi Awoyemi in their dormitory in Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife to help connect people looking for jobs with companies hiring. I was at Stanford at the time and Museke , the startup I co-founded was more than 2 years old. Many years on, Jobberman thrives and has more than 30 employees in Ghana alone. They have done well.  In this inter...

The time has come to host my profile somewhere on the web. There's no better place to start than here. :-) Profile of Ato Ulzen-Appiah Ato Ulzen-Appiah is a consultant, (social) entrepreneur, manager, social media champion and blogger . He hails from Elmina, grew up in Kumasi and lives in Accra . A notable alumni of Presec , he studied at MIT for his Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and had his Master's degree at Stanford in construction and engineering management.  He's the director at the  GhanaThink Foundation which mobilizes and organizes talent for the primary benefit of Ghana . GhanaThink, since its inception, has given birth to Kasahorow and Museke . It currently runs the Barcamp Ghana program (111 events since 2008) from which the Junior Camp Ghana program was created (40 events since 2013). Through GhanaThink, he also initiated National Volunteer Day in 2013, which is now part of the Ghana Volunteer Program . He also led the training o...

I have always been solution driven , especially since I returned to Ghana in 2011. Oftentimes, we discuss the problems and challenges that we face, complaining, a lot. I decided many years ago that I want to be part of conversations that start from: “This is how we are going to solve this problem”. I stopped mostly listening to Ghanaian radio because it is full of complaints, bad news and not enough “What are we doing about this problem?” I want to see what I call Solution Radio . Some journalists like Bernard Avle have been driving more of that. One of the problems is air pollution. We at GhanaThink and others funded by Clean Air Fund are doing something about this. We have been working on a Clean Air Ghana project funded by Clean Air Fund.  The tagline for the #CleanAirGhana project was eventually chosen as Be Part of the Solution, not the Pollution. The key people involved in this were Gameli Adzaho, Patrick Keli Atitsogbui, Irene Dery, Daniel Prince Yakuba, Ruky Jane Azusong, ...

India is home to arguably the biggest per capita number of competent cost-effective software engineers and techies. In April 2005, I visited India for the very first time thanks to my involvement with the World Summit Awards (WSA) . For the 2024 cycle, in an unprecedented showing, 3 of the 40 winners globally were from Ghana. They were the Achieve Investment App by Petra, Chango by IT Consortium and Khaya AI —by the Ghana NLP Project. I leveraged this visit to confirm what I knew before, learn more about India, network with folks, etc. A lot of us have heard about Bangalore , being the main IT city in a country that houses the most techies worldwide, amongst its population of 1 billion. While at MIT , I learnt about the multiple India Institute of Technology (IIT) institutions. They are amongst the most competitive academic environments in the world. I would not call you an idiot if you have not watched the 3 Idiots movie, but if you have not, go and watch it right away! The mov...