As a teenager in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city—an urban and commercial center very different from his father’s life in the rural north— Fred-Eric Essam, a senior solution sales professional for IBM in Germany, received a unique opportunity that would set him apart from many of his Cameroonian peers: he was given a scholarship to study biomedical engineering in Germany. Several years later, after earning his degree, Fred-Eric says, “In 2001 I had the opportunity to visit the ancestral home of my late father in Boboyo, in the Far North region of Cameroon, in Africa. Though it has gotten better, I left concerned about the region’s lack of educational and health infrastructures.”
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