African School Kid Makes His Own Radio Station Out Of Scrap

Every now and then we find a genius and are shocked to find out how so many people around us are God gifted. Such people usually think out of the box, make most of what they have at their disposal and are constantly working to execute their ideas, which mind you, are quite awesome indeed!
Among such people is Kelvin Doe, a young school kid in Sierra Leone. He managed to build a radio station. That doesn’t seem reason enough, right? Wait till you hear what he built the radio station with; recycled materials.

Yup, that’s right; he built a radio station by making use of recycled materials and was invited by MIT under the visiting practitioner program and he lectured at Harvard in 2012. Kelvin has been doing things like this ever since he was child. At the age of ten, he used to get up early in the morning and would go on a scavenger hunt. He kept on experimenting with all the materials that he found and his passion for inventing things out of scrap grew more and more. Sierra Leone is a place where almost everyone has a radio and Doe eventually began repairing radios for them.

Kelvin kicked off his career with a 3 channel mixer that employed scrap materials; transistors, capacitors, resistors and some cardboards from destroyed electronics. Later on, more components came into the mix and Kelvin became a DJ. He started doing gigs under the name of DJ Focus but soon enough, he realized that the money he was making was being spent largely on batteries so he set out to make batteries for himself. During his struggle to make a battery, he landed upon the idea of creating his own radio station.

He learned lessons on frequencies and how they are broadcasted and as expected, recognition came in for his work. His team was among the finalists in 2012 Innovate Salone Competition. Doe was also flown to New York for the World Maker Faire 2012. THNKR released a small documentary film on Kelvin and the video has managed above 6 million views already. Kelvin Doe has started a company which basically sends inventors to an institution in Sierra Leone to teach the folks how important engineering and innovation is.

Kelvin Doe has become a great speaker as well and has been at the TED as well. According to him, the critical qualities for any inventor include creativity, perseverance and the fiery passion. See more about him in the video below: