Ibrahim Kalokoh is Families Without Borders' first graduate. He studied information technology at the University of Makeni and graduated in February 2015.
Ibrahim is from Makeni, Sierra Leone and has 17 brothers and six sisters from one father and five mothers/stepmothers. His father died in 2006 and his mother has been missing for many years. Before joining the Families Without Borders program, Ibrahim was a driver and he washing cars as a source of income to take care of his younger siblings and himself.
Shortly after his start at the university, he learned to repair computers to earn money to feed his family. In October of 2013, we flew Ibrahim to San Francisco to give him the exposure of technology in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. He visited many small and large tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Citrix, Adobe, Intel, Plug and Play, Tech Shop and some of the smaller IT firms. Ibrahim reported that he was inspired by his trip to do greater work for his community using the knowledge he gained and the connections he built during this visit.
Upon his return to Sierra Leone, he helped Families Without Borders start the first high-speed internet cafe and technology center in Makeni. Ibrahim’s first job after graduation was as the data manager for a human trial of the Ebola vaccine in Sierra Leone. The study was managed by FHI and CDC and was a product of Merck Pharmaceutical.
Ibrahim received a full scholarship for a master's degree in software engineering in China and currently lives and studies outside of Beijing.