To Yared Ayele, education is key to improving the lives of people in his home country, Ethiopia.
A 2007 iSchool Informatics alumnus, Ayele is working as country director of Camara Education Ethiopia, a nongovernmental organization, to help accomplish that. Camara’s mission is to transform education through Information Communication Technology.
Ayele had lived in the United States from age 11, and returned to Africa in 2010 to work as a volunteer consultant at Dire Dawa University, which later grew into a leadership role at Camara.
Ayele told AfricanDevBoss he took a personal and professional risk to pursue something that could help change people’s lives for the better.
“For someone like myself who is interested to work in an area that can make lasting difference, the challenges were enormous,” Ayele said. “Working in Dire Dawa helped me see both these challenges and opportunities in many ways. One of the things I have learned is that development is a slow process. It takes a long-term investment focused on capacity building and sustainability. Things did not always go as I wanted them, there were administrative and resource challenges and many more, but I kept on moving forward.”