Mo ibrahim foundation

Mohamed "Mo" Ibrahim is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who earned his considerable fortune by building some of the first telephone networks in sub-Saharan Africa. What we need to do now is enforce good governance, and it's happening, perhaps not as quickly as I would like. All we need to do is push.

Mo ibrahim daughter

Ibrahim was born in into a family of Nubian heritage, an ethnic group whose traditional homelands stretch from southern Egypt into northern Sudan. He grew up in Cairo, Egypt, where his father worked as a clerk for a cotton-trade organization. The family, which numbered seven in all, lived in a small apartment that was often stifling in the heat of the warmer months.

During his childhood Ibrahim dreamed of becoming a scientist like his role model, Albert Einstein , but chose to study engineering when he entered the University of Alexandria on a partial scholarship. In , at the age of twenty-five, Ibrahim began an internship with the International Telecommunications Union, a regulatory body located in Geneva, Switzerland.

On his way to see a movie, he took a taxi and was enthralled by the driver's ability to communicate with the dispatcher back at the taxicab company's headquarters. This sparked his interest in mobile communications, an emerging field at the time.

Mo ibrahim wife

Mobile networks relied on radio-frequency signals—as the two-way radio in the cab did—rather than actual wires, as telephone lines required. Ibrahim went on to earn a graduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bradford in west Yorkshire, England, and then a doctorate in mobile communications from the University of Birmingham.

He went to work for British Telecom and became a technical director at Cellnet, a joint venture between British Telecom and a private investment group that was founded in to capture the coming British mobile-phone market. He grew weary of corporate politicking, however, and quit in to become a telecommunications consultant. Ibrahim's company was called Mobile Systems International, or MSI, and its first office was the dining-room table of the London home he shared with his wife and two children.

Over the next decade, MSI helped build mobile-phone networks in other countries for major operators, and became so successful that it was acquired by Marconi plc, a British telecommunications company whose original corporate roots were in the General Electric Company of Britain and the pioneering Italian radio manufacturer whose name it still carried.

The sale to Marconi in enriched not only Ibrahim, but many of his employees as well, to whom he had given shares of stock as bonuses.