Excerpts from AAI’s interview of Ing. Dr. Kwame Boakye:

“At the end of my first degree, of course the expectation was that I pack up and go and come back to Ghana, but then I got … the Columbia fellowship, and that's what I did. I did my masters. Then after that, I was a graduate research assistant. There was a professor that I had met, Professor Wink … Very early on I learned to do programing, so he had recruited me to support him, to help him … and then eventually I became his research graduate research assistant after my master's. He was the one who was my thesis advisor. I learned to program at my first year at Columbia and because of that, I could support him with this work.

Of course, when I became a graduate research assistant, I was doing research in other fields, and that was called distributed parameter networks. That's what I did after Columbia. You know, in life it’s amazing, a lot of things, more or less are chosen for you. So from Saint Joseph's, it was going to a sort of a natural, you know. I mean, looking back, maybe I had no reason to, but at the time … I was not sure. Going to the US was a discontinuity because it wasn't something that had ever entered my mind. But once I entered Columbia, [I went] to work at … AT&T Bell Research Laboratories, that used to be the premier telecom research labs.

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I brought a lot of value to Harris [Corportation]. My knowledge from Bell Labs and AT&T. Some of the things that I had learned from the Texas Pacific Group people ... So, when I first joined Harris, we had all these units, and a big part of it was to try to unify the company, which I think we did quite well. Then the next change was to bring the government business. So, I when I first joined Harris, I was the Chief Technology Officer and the Vice President of Technology for the sector. And after maybe 2 or 3 years, they agreed to bring all the sectors together into a unified business. So, that was a time that I was promoted to become the Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.

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In fact, when I became the CTO, we had some business in Africa, some small businesses, and I got close to the sales and marketing team and they convinced me that this could be big business. So I was able to persuade my boss … that we should invest in Nigeria … fortunately, we did very well in Nigeria … but it was tricky … I became like the patron for businesses in Africa

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ASPAU had three components - the universities, the AAI, and the USAID. And the AAI was sort of the coordinating agency and USAID provided some of the funds for us to live, nd so and the university gave us the tuition. So obviously, ASPAU has made a big part of my life [which] has been in the US, and it's because of ASPAU … so to that extent ASPAU has done well for me and a whole lot of other people.”