The Adventure of Bashiru Mansaray

Meet young Bashiru Mansaray a 21-year-old student from Kenema, Sierra Leone. His adventure to become a change agent for his community began on the day he first came into contact with a mobile phone.

Back in school, Bashiru Mansaray was one of the few students that enjoyed the luxury of owning a phone. That phone became a contact point to the world of technology for him.

In a society where youths are fascinated by technology and prefer to be consumers, young Bashiru wanted to know the internal dynamics that caused the phone to work, its displays, functions etc. His enthusiasm for technology grew beyond the expectation a normal kid would have in a third world country like Sierra Leone.

This led Bashiru to start experimenting with his hands, inspired by his desire to explore the wildest possibility of designing his own technology – whatever that would be.

His dream began to materialize when Bashiru went to Liberia on holidays. He enrolled at a summer camp where kids were taught some basic skills about information communication technology. He quickly learned about the dynamics of technology and understood the complexities that came with it. He saw the possibility of providing easy solutions to communication by using technology as a driver to achieve that.

With this inner drive, Bashiru applied for the Innovate Salone Awards in 2016 and was nominated as one of the finalists and also took part in the UNDP Social Good Summit Program that same year.

Bashiru has been passionate about IT from a young age and as a change agent, he has that desire to make IT accessible to everyone. His dream has lead him to create IT solutions that will help the common man in Sierra Leone and Africa at large.

Today, Bashiru is a Co-founded and C.T.O of an ICT Company which is dubbed as iCANSL. iCANSL is the brainchild of Bashiru Mansaray, popularly called Clanzy Tha Smartzee. His recent creations include LearnTech In-House ICT and Mobile ICT Training.

Bashiru Mansaray iCANSL’s LearnTech initiative is designed to enable students from as young as 8 years gain basic computer knowledge and be able to utilize them in solving day to day challenges.

You too can be like young Bashiru and join the league of African entrepreneurs who are providing solutions to ease the life of people in their community. According to a recent statement by Tony Elumelu he quoted; “Young African – You are brave, you are resilient. You are savvy, you are entrepreneurial, and unlike the generations that have come before you, you are much hungrier for success.”