This post was originally produced for Forbes.
This week, I am in Ethiopia on a service expedition with Rotary International to support a National Immunization Day for Polio. While here, I encountered an unanticipated social enterprise.
Bob Cairns, one of the Rotarians on the trip, is a retired civilian employee of the U.S. Navy who previously served in the Air Force; he worked managing the Navy’s largest fuel depot. He is distinctly not an entrepreneur nor tech savvy. He should be cruising with his wife of 40+ years, Christine. But he’s not. I’ll tell you why.
Bob has a plan to revolutionize education in Kenya and across Sub-Saharan Africa with a gadget called a Raspberry Pi developed in the UK by a team from Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. The gadget is a tiny, radically affordable computer. It costs just $38.41 on Amazon.com. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a nonprofit based on the UK.
Working with Spencer Foxworth, who does know something about computers, Bob and Spencer followed instr…