Kelvin Doe was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1996 as the youngest of five children. His creative instincts have been with him as a child and he would often dream of solutions to problems in his community. At the age of 10, he started scavenging for scrap electronics parts from dump sites after school for his inventions.
Kevin Doe- Persistent Experimentation
Kelvin, together with his team, was a winner of Global Minimum’s Innovate Salone 2012 — the inaugural high school innovation challenge in Sierra Leone. He had built a radio station for his community out of recycled materials, in addition to homemade batteries and a generator. Kelvin was selected to travel to the U.S. in 2012, where he was invited to speak at the “Meet the Young Makers” panel at the World Maker Faire 2012 in New York.
Kelvin officially became the youngest ever “visiting practitioner” with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) International Development Initiative. At MIT, he presented his inventions to students in two D-Lab classes, engaged with community members at MIT, and participated in hands-on research at the MIT Media Lab. He has also lectured to undergraduate engineering students at Harvard College.
Kelvin’s experience captured on a YouTube video has been viewed over 4 million times and continues to inspire other young people in his country and around the world. Kelvin is presently continuing his high school education at Prince of Wales secondary school in Sierra Leone.
