Editor's Note: (Elvis Chidera is a developer at dot Learn in Lagos, a startup which builds educational apps for students in emerging markets. The opinions in this article belong to the author.)
(CNN) I'm a 19-year-old developer at an MIT-backed startup called dot Learn in Lagos, living in the bustle of Nigeria's largest city. But until recently my life was quite different.
Just a few years ago, I was living in rural southeastern Nigeria and had nothing but a basic Nokia 2690 phone -- and a big dream to improve the world using technology.
Here's my journey from "village boy" to the epicenter of West Africa's tech boom.
Learning to code
I began programming at 11 years old. As a kid I spent hours on websites and downloading and playing the latest games. After a while I became curious about how websites, which seemed to exist almost by magic, were built -- and how I could build one myself.
My first step was, like most people, to Google it. This led me to the W3Schools tutorials, a handy site where you can learn to program.
To build a website I needed a computer, but no one in my family could afford one. Luckily, my relative gave me a Nokia 2690 phone. It wasn't very advanced, but adequate enough for me to learn the language of programming.
The new Zuckerberg?
Once I had become a capable programmer, the idea for my first web project was sparked after I watched The Social Network movie, which about the founding of Facebook.
I was inspired by Mark Zuckerberg. But I wanted to go further and create something better. At that time Facebook was set up to connect people you already knew, but I wanted to create a platform which connected everybody.
After some time and a lot of effort, my attempt to replace Facebook fell through. I couldn't get enough users to sign up on the website. The few that signed up didn't stick around because there was only a few people to chat with.
A new idea, a new app
I quickly moved onto my next idea: an app that makes it easy to send text messages to multiple people at once and at an affordable price. The cost of sending text messages in Nigeria was around $0.013, I planned on reducing it to $0.005.
To build the app, I learned a new programming language called Java. I also needed to have a computer to compile the code, but I still couldn't afford one. Fortunately, I was able to find a way to build an app right on my Nokia phone, through an application called J2ME SDK Mobile.
I spent days programming, carefully typing everything on the phone's small number pad. After a few months, I had built the website and the app.
The app launch went well -- at least better than my first project. We got some local press and grew to about 5,000 users. There were a few daily transactions, but over time, due in part to my inexperience (I was still only 14 years old), I was not able to keep up with the number of users and had to shut the app down.
It was becoming clear that to take my programming skills to the next level I would need a computer. I cut my daily expenses and lived a simple a life as possible. I asked my relatives for help. I even sold some personal belongings to raise money for the laptop.
Still, it wasn't enough. Determined to achieve my goal, I took on a freelance job building a website to earn the remaining sum.
How do you build a website for PC on a feature phone? Simple: have a Facebook friend you disturb every night to view your website on his computer and give you feedback. It was cheaper than going to a cyber cafe.
Making apps
African innovations that could change the world
Welcome, to the bleeding-edge of African innovation: VR, 3D printing, AI and the rest. The continent isn't just driving technological change for Africa, but for the world. Click through to discover the inventions and innovations coming out of Africa.
3D printing - 3D printing is gaining traction in Africa. In 2013, WoeLabs tech hub in Togo made the first "Made in Africa" 3D printer from e-waste. They want to use the 3D printer to revolutionize Africa. They're starting by putting a machine in every school within 1km of the workshop. Buni Hub is another tech center, based in Tanzania, that is building 3D printers.
Pneumonia is a deadly condition. It's responsible for
16% of all deaths of children under five. A main contributing factor to this is slow diagnosis. Ugandan inventor Brian Turyabagye has created a biomedical smart jacket that can diagnose the condition four times faster than a doctor. It's also more accurate. It analyzes the chest and then sends the information via Bluetooth to a smartphone app.
Read more about this biomedical breakthrough.
African countries are developing groundbreaking technology for space exploration. Look no further than the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in South Africa which, once completed, is set to be world's largest telescope. It will allow scientists to look many times deeper into space.
Read more about Africa's journeys into space.
VR has the potential to change many industries. One example is mining, a profession which has its dangers and risks. In an effort to create a safe yet accurate training environment, a team at the University of Pretoria, South Africa have a created the continent's first
VR mine. The center allows students and mining staff to train in a simulated mining environment. African filmmakers are also making forays into VR experimentation. Examples of recent releases are
Let This Be A Warning and
The Other Dakar.
'Made in Africa' cars are on the rise. Mobius Motors, pictured above, are a Kenyan based car company who are releasing the second model of their stripped-down, cost-effective but luxury SUV built for rough terrains. They aim to sell the car to the African mass market, and anywhere else in the world with poor quality roads.
Read more about Africa's car industries.
Nigerian inventor, Osh Agabi, has created a device that fuses live neurons from mice stem cells into a silicon chip -- for the first time. The device can be used to detect explosives and cancer cells.
Read more about Agabi's innovation.
Cameroonian entrepreneur, Arthur Zang, has invented a touch-screen heart monitoring device that records, and then sends heart activity to a national healthcare center for evaluation. It could have hugely positive potential for rural populations far from hospitals.
Read more about this device.
The South Africa based
drone software company aims to help farmers optimize their output using artificial intelligence. They have created a data-analytics platform, Aeroview, which combines satellite, drone and artificial intelligence technology to improve agricultural practices.
In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, traffic is a huge issue -- like in many of the world's megacities. Drivers spend hours stuck in traffic jams. A team of Congolese engineers, based at the Kinshasa Higher Institute of Applied Technique, have created human-like robots to help tackle problem. The machines are equipped with four cameras that allow them to record traffic flow. The information is then transmitted to a center where it can be analyzed, and then used to direct traffic.
Read more about robots in Africa.
According to the
International Energy Agency over 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to electricity.
Off Grid Electric, an African startup backed by Elon Musk's Solar City, is looking to solve this by initiating the rapid supply of solar panels across Africa
They charge $7 a month for the system. It already powers 125,000 households.
Could this be a big step forward for the 1.3 billion people globally who lack access to electricity?
Read more about this solar-powered energy revolution.
Three developers from Kenya, Marvin Makau, Edwin Inganji and Kenneth Gachukia, have created a panic button app that sends a distress signal with the shake of a phone. The app,
Usalama, works by connecting people with emergency service providers, and sends their exact location when they shake their phone three times. It also alerts a next of kin and every other Usalama users within 200 meters. They're looking to expand their technology beyond the continent and help make people safer.
BeSpecular, an app from South Africa, allows volunteers to remotely assist blind people. The app uses an algorithm to connect the right people, those similar in age and physical location.
Read more about this app
.
Where the rest of the world has lagged behind, Africa has led the way with mobile payments.
M-Pesa is the most popular service and has 30 million users in 10 countries. Since it was first introduced 10 years ago, M-Pesa has inspired a range of similar services around the world and has helped reduce barriers to finance.
Read more about how Africa led the way with mobile payments
The Zamani Project, based in South Africa, is concerned with the preservation of African heritage sites. They use high-tech scanning systems which document these sites in remarkable detail.
Click here to read more about the project.
It's been the dream of sci-fi enthusiasts and inventors for decades, but has this Nigerian man created a flying jet car that can dodge traffic? Kehinde Durojaiye, or "Kenny Jet", is attempting to build an aero-amphibious jet car. He's driven it on sea and land. Now it's only the air that he has left to conquer.
Find out more about the potential of this flying car.
Finally I was able to get a laptop. I switched immediately to creating Android apps. The Android platform didn't have the limitations that exist on the J2ME platform which, for a techie like me, was very exciting.
At this point, I was now a high school graduate, and I was looking for freelance jobs to support my family. I saw a job advert for an Android developer position at dot Learn. I looked them up and realized it was set up by two MIT-based technologists working in a field that I was passionate about, education technology.
They had a unique idea: to solve the problem of access to online education by making educational videos extremely data-light -- as low as 1MB for every hour of video.
I felt this was key to making education more accessible, as cheap and fast internet connection needed to download large videos is still uncommon in Africa.
I am very passionate about revolutionizing education in Africa. In fact, I had already built a free (ad-supported) exam prep app called PrepUp with over 30,000+ installs and was one of the finalists at the West Africa Mobile Awards 2016.
After several days of debating with myself, I finally applied for the position. Well, long story short: after lots of preparation, a phone interview, coding projects, and answering challenging questions, I was accepted.
Working at dot Learn, I have met lots of awesome people from MIT, Harvard, and other great places. As a team, we have been part of some testing competitions like the Techcrunch Battlefield Africa, Cisco Innovation Challenge, and the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge.
It's been incredible so far, and dot Learn is just one of many startups, like Andela and iROKO, in the growing tech ecosystem bursting in Lagos.
It's hard to believe this journey all began with a basic Nokia phone.