(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Nelly Cheboi and Tyler Cinnamon came from very different backgrounds.
Cheboi didn't touch a computer until she was 18; Cinnamon grew up playing computer games.
Now, they’re software engineers working to bring computer skills and potential online jobs to rural parts of Kenya, where Cheboi grew up.
Their non-profit is TechLit Africa.
“If think about an entire community, an entire country and so many rural communities in Africa not having access to this, they’re really being left behind,” she said.
TechLit Africa obtains computers donated by companies. Right now, the organization has 150 computers serving 4,000 young people in Kenya.
“A kid is coming to our lab twice a week, and they’re learning about programming and they’re learning about coding. They’re learning about design, they’re learning about communication,” Cheboi explains.
The children will know enough after graduating high school so that they’ll be able to get jobs that can be done online. Cheboi sees TechLit Africa as “an opportunity for someone to go from making $2 a day to making $8 an hour.”
Cinnamon, Cheboi’s partner in life and in Techlit Africa, said the organization needs hundreds more donated computers.
“To do 100 computer labs, we need around 2,000. We already have about 500 collected and we need another 1,500,” he said.
TechLit Africa began in 2018. He and Cheboi first started collecting old computers from family and friends. The next year, they started obtaining them from companies that were upgrading to different models.
“When the companies donate the computers, we wipe the hard drives. We erase all of the data on there securely and then we ship them over to Kenya,” Cinnamon said.
Cheboi and Cinnamon say they spend half the year in Kenya, the other half in the United States.
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