#360Mentor is a continuation of the #40DayMentor series. In this episode, Robert Kabushenga (RK) speaks to Solomon King (SK) on Robotics & Education.
RK: Solomon, it’s good to have you on #360Mentor
SK: Thank you Robert for the invite.
RK: I will go straight into the conversation. There is a question I usually ask our guests; Solomon, were you born a robot?
SK: I get that joke every year on my birthday. No. I am completely human at least about 99% I cannot confirm the 1%.
RK: When I was much younger, we used to have a dance called “robot”. I cannot remember whether it was for breakdance but all I remember is that you had to dance like a robot. And it was a cool thing to do.
SK: Absolutely, it’s the only dance I can dance. I have two left feet.
RK: Hahahaha, so you can’t even do the shuffle?
SK: No, I can’t. Which is why, I would rather build a robot to do that for me.
RK: And then you delegate it to do the work for you?
SK: Absolutely! Delegation.
RK: I’ve got a question for you; who is Solomon King Benge? Who are you?
SK: I honestly really find that question hard to answer because I am so many things.
RK: You can just say, “I am a man”
SK: I am an infinitely curious man. I am a social entrepreneur. I take great pride in the fact that I dropped out of the university in my first semester. I believe money is just a means of getting things done. I love learning. I love tinkering. But my core interest is helping humanity move forward. I believe there is a lot we can do as a continent. And I feel duty bound to do it. So yeah, I am a writer, photographer, robotist, educator but my main work is promoting robotics education or Fundi Bots.
RK: Let me go back to what Stephen Musoke asked; we know you for robotics and science but you actually read a lot. Let’s first leave the robotics, by the way, did you come with Nigel?
SK: I need to apologise to Teddy. Nigel needs to be rebuilt. The man has disturbed me so much. I need to rebuild him and put him at the Raintree Farms. So Teddy one day, I will bring him.
RK: Then there is someone who said you have a virtual presenter
SK: I created this project in June. I was really excited. I was trying to explain artificial intelligence in very simple ways. I wanted to go into the journey of AI but that got me in a lot of trouble. People thought I had built Javis, like Ironman. While this is a virtual presenter, it is not proper AI as people think it is. I will bring it back at some point because a lot of people are asking.
RK: Let’s go back to Musoke’s question; how come you are in all these things; arts, science, robotics, photography, reading, name it. The only thing I have not heard you take part in is coffee and maybe farming, what are all these other diverse interests that you have?
SK: Alright, professionally I am an animator. I have run a 3D media firm. I do video work, which we used to do at work. We used to do media work for MTN back in the day. I used to run a web development company. Right now, I am into education. I enjoy painting, I enjoy photography.
Let me just say, I love creating so much. Everytime I see something, my first question is can I do this? I then drown myself in that space that I get lost in and come out like weeks later having picked up a skill or two. Without sounding like I am bragging, I am really blessed that I can learn very very quickly and very diverse things. And that has helped to broaden the scope of things that I know. But beyond that, I have been able to share this information with other people to help them understand and appreciate things like animation concepts better and help them understand things better. But yeah, there’s some order to the chaos.
RK: I want to take you back, looking back at your childhood, what do you think was responsible for the person that you have become now?
SK: I love that question because the work that we are doing at Fundi Bots, if I was to speak to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, it’s essentially me trying to save my younger self. I grew up in Bugolobi Flats, Lugazi (where I learnt my Luganda from) and Najjanankumbi. In all those three spaces, I found out I was very curious about the world around me.
I grew up in the 90s, there was no internet then. TV started at 6:30pm and closed at 11:30pm and during the rest of the day, you had to explore the world. I was infinitely curious. When I was growing up in Bugolobi flats, my cousins tease me to this day because I would spend my time, looking through dustbins looking for old electronics, old radios, cassette players and I would try to understand, what is it about them that makes a voice come out of a radio. This’ me at 6? I was really hungry for knowledge.
When I moved to Lugazi, I would roam around the village trying to look for electronics to make those little lights come to life. The biggest frustration for me was that there was nowhere to go. There was no place for me to learn. A place that would teach me. My biggest learning places awere TV and movies.
RK: So, let me be sure that I understand you well; for you learning means, getting to know things, internalising things and having the opportunity to practise them?
Sk: Yes. 100%. And not just practising, but practising with a purpose.
RK: What do you mean ‘with a purpose’?
SK: For me, knowledge is something that needs to be channelled. When we collect information and package it, we are essentially creating a context for using that information. Knowing that there’s a base that you can channel it in a form that can serve the world whether you are making a radio, solving an equation or making a toy, there has to be a purpose and that’s why for me purpose is very important for learning.
RK: Tell me about your school and the contrast in your face. Where did you find the incongruence?
SK: I built my first robot in primary four.
RK: How?
SK: This was about 1993. There was no way I could get all this information. I saw cartoons and I thought this looks like something that can work, and because I was always collecting mortars and batteries. I was those kids that would collect stuff. I would make a wire car with a steering wheel of a stick, remember them? For me, I was building mine with batteries and a mortar and controlling it remotely with just a wire.
RK: So you already had a drone?
SK: I did. Now imagine a child like me ending up in an academic system that told you to first forget about all this creativity you have in your head and read this paragraph and memorise it and repeat it in an exam six months from now. Like that’s literally the worst possible place I could be. Primary school was a bit flexible but I was really excited about secondary school. I had heard about all these labs of chemistry, biology and physics. I was excited because I was going to a place where experimentation is encouraged.
RK: And there were all the facilities for that purpose.
SK: Yes, I was so excited because there were teachers who used to do this. I remember after my first physics lesson, I was so excited. I spent the first thirty minutes thereafter writing in notes.
RK: Which school was this?
SK: I don’t like saying where I went because… just know I went to a good school which had a lab. It was really exciting. But again, it was about the same thing; get this information, memorise it and produce it in an exam. I remember the pivotal thing that Fundi Bots would later become of was this book from the physics section in the school library. And it was this gentleman called Eric who used to do Christmas lectures. He would teach children about a concept and he titled the book, ‘Magnetism in Wonderland’. And because I had read about ‘Alice in Wonderland’, and now there was this book on magnetism, it was such a fascinating concept. And I wanted to do every experiment in this book. So I took the book to the teacher and asked him why don’t we do all the experiments in the book and he said this is not on the curriculum. It’s not important, please go and read your books.
That was the moment I realised consciously or subconsciously that this was not a place for me. It was not a place I could thrive. I spent the rest of the years thriving through the system. I was a fairly brilliant child in primary school but then I got delusional with school and I just moved through school. I spent 6 years in school, which was a good relief.
I never got enough points for the course I wanted at Makerere. I ended up in Kyambogo with a course I didn’t want. But you know with our education system, your entire life is determined by one paper not who you are. Not what your progress has been, what your trajectory is. Just one paper and you’re done. So I dropped out in the first semester.
I was very privileged to have started working at an internet café in my S6 vac. Discovering the internet was the thing for me. I had discovered a world of endless knowledge. There was no turning back. I dropped out of school, and Fundi Bots started a few years after that.
RK: Did your folks know that you had dropped out of school?
SK: Oh my! My dad was pissed. He was mad. He was a disciplinarian and an academic. Me dropping out of school was the last thing he expected.
RK: No. No. No. You guy, you’re in trouble.
SK: I think I broke the poor man’s heart. I don’t think he ever recovered. But he is very proud now.
RK: I mean we all are. People like me bow for you. You have scaled incredible heights. You’ve done well.
This brings me to my next question. You have strong views about our education system, where is it failing us. Where is it failing our kids and how can we fix it?
SK: If you look at what the ministry has planned, it is like science. In theory, things look good but in practicals, it’s where things start falling apart. The Ministry of Education has developed a lower secondary school curriculum that addresses some of the things I have issues with. The trouble is with implementation.
One of the challenges with our education system is that you have teachers, most of whom failed to get their dream careers. The majority of people who join education do not want to be in education. They wanted to be an engineer, doctor but failed to make it.
RK: They went there as a last resort.
SK: True. So you find that they don’t like it. They are not passionate about it. They don’t even want to be there but somehow they are in a classroom. Obviously, they are not going to do their work well. There is a report which came out by the world bank. It was looking at the education system in different countries and one of the findings published on Uganda was that mathematics teachers in P5 could not perform better than the learners in that class.
That is heartbreaking. We have teachers who are underpaid and they don’t want to be there. They don’t have the resources that they need. If we prioritized stronger filters of the teachers we get, if we prioritised their welfare and payments. If we could value them; teachers and health workers, we would thrive better as a country.
So everything looks good in theory but practicals is where things get bad.
RK: I mean we have secondary schools in this country that do not have laboratories but are teaching sciences
SK: Yes. One of the reports I used to quote back in the day, I think it was from the National Council for Higher Education, a 2012 report. One of the statistics they shared was a number close to 40% who are doing a practical science exam who see the science equipment for the first time in their final exam, an exam that is going to determine what they are going to do in their life. Somehow they are supposed to use it. Use it well and pass that exam. Of course they are bound to fail. We have a higher than 70% failure rate in chemistry. When you go to rural school, it is worse.
RK: I want to understand the journey, the mental thinking that led you to start Fundi Bots.
SK: After all these frustrations I had in school, this dream remained with me.
RK: Which dream was this?
SK: At that point when the teacher told me the experiments I wanted to do were not on the curriculum, I knew there had to be a way. At the time, my father was running a local food restaurant in town. Amazing Acholi food. So I was carrying my basket of oddi and gnuts to go to the restaurant. I remember very vividly standing on Kampala Road and wondering, what if there was a place like this, a place where kids like me would be guided and supported. That idea at that time did not have a name but it stayed with me. It is what became Fundi Bots. I promised myself that if I ever got rich, I was going to do something.
Fundi waited for me to first take cycles and routes and then one day, I credit Teddy for that inflection point in my life. He organised a Diaspora conference. He brought together lots of people from government institutions who told me I cannot be a scientist because I don’t have a qualification even when I told them I was making robots. They told me those were not real because I didn’t have qualifications.
In that conference, I met an amazing lady called Betty Kitui who was running non academic science programs in schools. When she heard that I was making robots, she immediately reached out. She invited me to speak to her students about robotics. I went there with Nigel and the kids were so excited. She told me she had never seen the students so excited. So she kept inviting me to talk about space, nanotechnology. So I would do my research.
In 2011, we registered our organization. In 2012, we got our first funding from Google. In 2014, I became an Eco Green fellow, Ashoka fellow, and those two organisations helped to start running Funid Bots full time.
RK: This Science for Africa, what’s your vision? What do you want to achieve with it?
SK: Two things. The first is to accelerate science learning. This involves two sides;
1. You have to move very first to catch up with something that has already gone ahead of you. The work we are doing is to accelerate that movement starting with education. We want to get to where the rest of the world is.
2. To accelerate information. My view is that with the right context, we can create technology that makes our continent superior.
I don’t want to say this because every time I say it people roll their eyes but when I watched the Black Panther movie, I saw the Africa I want to see. An Africa that has fused its core tradition with modern ways. When you look at the design, the aesthetics, the beads, the computers and that stuff, we can create the Africa we want.
We need an Africa whose education is rooted in its traditions. An Africa that is going to be for us not the kind which copies everything from abroad. That’s where I want us to be.
RK: So what’s the story with the 3000 students you are involved with?
SK: They are actually 10,000 students that we have worked with. We want to work with a million over the next ten years. It’s going to be like an insane period of growth. We started proper work in 2014.
RK: What do you mean by proper work, what were you doing?
SK: Essentially, Fundi Bots started like a hobby. I would leave work and go and teach. But in 2014, because of the support that I got from those organisations,I was able to do it full time. This meant we could hire a team, we had regular timetables where we could go to school and teach the students. Over time we have been able to train over 10,000 students, 377 teachers, and we have worked with 175 schools.
We built a team of about 50 people. What we are doing is actually three fronts. We now have the work Fundi Bots does at home and the work Fundi Bots does at school and the work Fundi Bots does for work.
At school, we teach students about robotics every Saturday after the school program. We teach students about robotics and get them excited about science either through a Fundi program or a dedicated program. But we are also developing something that is an inter curriculum meaning that it will be built on tools seated inside the national curriculum. So this is a pilot we are running. We are planning to run it with 3000 students.
If you look at the science curriculum, physics and chemistry haven’t changed but because we don’t have very strong practical learning tools especially in rural areas. What Fundi Bots is doing is to unpack the curriculum. We are doing a curriculum enhancement that is supposed to have started in 2020. But we didn’t start because of covid. Even this year, it didn’t. We shall start once we have reached our hypothetical 4.8 million vaccinations and schools reopen.
RK: By the way, they have gone to 7 million, so good luck.
SK: Robert, I am scared for the future of this country.
RK: Tell me why?
SK: We have a generation of kids now that have abandoned school, or have fallen so far off that it is going to take them over five years to recover. We have teachers that have literally walked away from the classroom and are not going back. We have a crisis that is going to take us about 5 -10 years to fix. It looks simple right now but the long term repercussions are going to be felt with time. First of all, the number of girls that have been raped is just so high. The number of students that are not going to be able to continue with education is just heartbreaking. The repercussions are really bad. We need the schools urgently opened. Here in Kampala it looks different because kids are doing online learning but trust me, it is different. Twitter represents like 3% of the internet users yet we make noise like we are 90%.
RK: I think even 3% is an exaggeration.
SK: Right! I really don’t know.
RK: From where you are, what future do you see?
SK: The history of the traditional classroom was meant to prepare us for work. Basically, sit, listen to someone, repeat what they have said and you receive a certificate. The future that I see is tech driven. You have things like virtual reality, AI and Machine learning that are opening up new avenues where learning can be highly individualised. Think about this; you have a hundred kids in the classroom with one teacher who has to command their attention. The students are divided into streams; the clever, the daft and the dafter. But with AI and machine learning you can have one machine paying attention to every single child in that classroom. It’s the program that tells the teacher that this child needs attention with this or that. All these things we are afraid of are meant to help us become wiser and have access to the things we really need to do the exploration of the world around us.
RK: If you had to talk to someone like me who is a parent, I am involved in making decisions for my children’s future. If you sat down with me, what would you tell me?
SK: First of all, I’d say do not impose your views, your past and your traumas on children.
RK: Oh my! The traumas. Oh my! And I have many of them.
SK: Do not impose anything on the child. The minute you start imposing anything on the child. You are creating boxes and boundaries around this person and you are killing their potential. A lot of parents have this thing about them where they want their children to become a certain somebody, a teacher, a doctor, name it. But do not dictate the direction you want them to take. If they want to sing, let them be. If they want to build a car, allow them. Whatever they want to do, let them be.
The thing about learning and knowledge is that eventually the things you are passionate about rise to the surface. You will never know your child’s true potential until you let them be. By giving them all these opportunities you are saying, let’s see the real you come out.
First of all, learning at a young age is very experimental. Children learn by touching, seeing, and interacting with a lot of things, their knowledge comes together in very interesting ways. You may find that they wanted ballet when they were young but now they want to be something else. But along the way they will develop a tool or something that will help ballerinas improve their craft or something that no one could ever have noticed because they have never been ballerinas.
My advice to parents is let your kid be a kid but nurture them to become who they will become. That’s how humanity moves forward.
RK: Talk to me about all these new skills and trainings that are coming up like robotics. I hear people talking about quantum computing, the other day someone said computational biology, is the world creating new areas that were not there before?
SK: Oh yes. This has been happening for the last five years or so. For all the years human beings have been in existence, we have been exploring. We didn’t just reach here. Everyone explored something. Before coming on this call, a video popped up on my screen showing an automated research lab. So this robot analyses what you are doing and it begins mixing the experiments for you and tells you when it is ready. This robot has come and saved hundreds of hours of research time. It’s able to do 100 plus experiments within minutes. You who would have done this experiment in four hours, imagine how much time it will help you to narrow down. And you don’t have to pay for this equipment, you now have access from your pc. It’s opening up a lot of potential for research and all sorts of things. And all this is just because machines are able to do things faster and more efficiently than human beings.
RK: There is something else I would like you to help me understand. You have helped yourself to learn so many things on your own. You didn’t have to go and sit in a classroom and get a PhD although you sound like you have one. What are the personal attributes that have made you this kind of person? How do you orient your mind to a point that you don’t spend your time watching dancing cats on YouTube but watch meaningful things?
SK: That’s a tough one because I really spend time watching cats dancing on youtube. I think for me, it’s like when you have a thread popping out of a shirt and you pull it out and the only thing you know is that the entire shirt is gone. Because of this one thread that was holding the shirt together. For me, I just see something and dive in. I don’t know whether to call it discipline, I think it’s curiosity. I just want to explore and learn things. And the only way I am able to maintain it is that I know the priorities that I have. I believe in deep focus. I believe in something called kaizen which is continuous self improvement. I believe in purpose driven learning. Whenever I am learning something I ask myself, where will I use this? And it is a very good thing to always ask yourself the where. Oftentimes I am going down a rabbit hole, it is the place that brings me out.
I have a lot of discipline for my time. When I choose to do something, however meaningless it is, I will do it.
RK: Let me ask you a personal question, do you have a family?
SK: No, I don’t.
RK: Any plans?
SK: Yeah. Many plans. There are no candidates yet.
RK: Hahaha. We can mobilise, I know a few. Some of them are even on these spaces.
SK: I know three people here who are trying to hook me up with some people.
RK: The reason I ask is; if you are blessed with children and they all did a Solomon on you (and they dropped out of school) how would you address that situation?
SK: My kid brother just started university recently. And this is what I told him; I dropped out of school and I would advise you not to drop out of school.
RK: Why?
SK: I will tell you this; I have been shortlisted for some consultancy contracts. But there is always a roadblock and that roadblock is; do you have these academic qualifications? And the problem is, this academic qualification is not an indicator of the knowledge I have. and I look at some successful hires and I know, objectively, that I am better than the person. But because that person had that one paper that checked the box that an HR needed. We live in a world that is broken in system that if you have this one thing missing, you are not going to go any far. I am very lucky that I have been self-employed since 2003. I have never really felt the weight of not having an academic qualification.
But I will tell you, get that paper. Get that degree. But on top of that, be exposed and learn. Our education system is not enough with that paper. The fact that you have that degree will not match the knowledge you will have acquired.
What I would tell my kids is to supplement their classroom learning with outside learning. The internet is a great equalizer. You can learn from the internet. And you can learn from a far more competent way than any university will ever teach you.
If you are a university student reading this learning from university class, learning from a lecturer and thinking that is all the knowledge you will need, you are most likely learning less than 20% of what you should be learning. My advice would be, supplement your learning with the internet. But also if you choose to drop out, there are so many things with which you can supplement your learning that will keep you happy and well paid for a very long long time. You just have to be disciplined, diligent and hardworking.
RK: There are your principles. Diligence, discipline and hard work. On top of that we add curiosity and the love for learning. What would you say that amounts to a great opportunity in today’s tech world? What do you see?
SK: The thing is, Africa’s challenges are unique to Africa. There are so many opportunities out there. Take the example of Eversend, the work that my friend Stone Atwine and his team are doing. Very amazing stuff. Things like robotics are opportunities that are waiting for us. Once you are able to identify a problem, put yourself to work. Africa has many opportunities in agriculture, education, finance, land, forestry. We are actually a melting pot of problems. It’s like all the problems of this world are seated here. It’s upon you to figure out which of those problems that you want to solve. If you want to do it for money, fine, if you want to do it for impact, find out which one has the best impact. Then you can go and find the solutions that need to be done.
Comrade Otoa: What does it seem like from your side, seeing that robots are taking on a lot of people’s work? AI is here, what are we going to do about it?
SK: First of all, the singular process of science by the government is wrong. Humanity does not live in isolation from the sciences. We don’t live in silos. You don’t have a community of scientists living away from the arts.
We need each other. We are intricately connected. We should have equal focus for the sciences and the arts. And just because gees are the ones connecting all these tools for connectivity doesn’t mean that they are the ones that need to be focused on. You can make the argument that creating a science centred economy can lead to economic growth, but that should not be a leading determinant of which learning area should be focused on.
If anything, we should have an increased number of labs and innovation centres set up to help grow these skills but not saying that artists are not important.
It is very unfortunate that technology is taking away jobs.
I would like to go back to things like the printing press, the spinning room, the assembly line, internet, computers etc. All these were once a threat. They called for riots in some places. But when you look at all those industries, they survived. Someone wanted to burn a printing press because it threatened their job but look at the books that have come out as a result. The vast burst in knowledge and the exponential growth in jobs including Amazon. There are lots of opportunities but true there is going to be a lot of casualties and this is where governments need to pay closer attention. Like how do you re-skill the workforce? How do you create education systems that make people not get stuck in linear jobs? How do you create an environment where people can adapt? Where they can learn to code? There are opportunities. But there are going to be challenges as well. The legal fields are now seeing how robots are filtering information. A robot can process 30,000 documents in the process of one minute and find the file you are looking for.
At the same time, it creates for us the opportunity to create more meaningful work for people. Most of the work these machines take is menial, dangerous, low quality and the promise is that with the advent of more machines. We shall be able to find more meaningful work. But it’s going to be rough, I cannot deny that. There are going to be issues down the road. And my hope is that every government is taking note of this and planning for its citizens that they can handle the transitions very well.
Geoffery Mutabazi: How do you go about hiring talent at Fundi Bots?
Uganda has more hardware entrepreneurs than most countries in Africa, but how are we going to go about this? Do we take the design route or manufacture route?
SK: At Fundi Bots, we mainly hire interns and volunteers because it gives us an opportunity to sort of see things like work ethic, passion, commitment. Our internship program is very intense. Our interns tell us they learn more from us in months than they learn in three years at university.
On hiring, I like to hire more on the side of passion and curiosity. This is represented by the kind of projects people are doing in their free time. Never hire someone based on their class project because there are probably 15 people in total. In that regard, a degree is an added bonus.
I am not so familiar with hardware production since I am so committed to building our production facilities. But you absolutely cannot beat the production efficiency that China has. China has been building its production capacity for the past five decades. They have created such production efficiency that you cannot compete with that. Where you can stand out from China is things like quality control. For every single piece you are building, China will always be better. The thing we can do as a country is to pride ourselves in a Made in Uganda product which is a brand value, but when it comes to hardware tools, it does not thrive on brand value, does it work like it is intended or as it’s advertised?
So if we were to choose where to put our energy, for the sake of efficiency, for the sake of scientific innovations, our best focus is in product design.
The Matunda Man: What do you think about Africa and crypto currencies and also what do you think about humanoids?
SK: The blockchain on its own creates a great opportunity for Africa especially with the distribution ledgers. This means we can have records that cannot be changed, modified etc. Crypto currencies open up a whole dimension for money. Crypto is like mobile money on steroids. You can transfer money across the entire continent in a matter of seconds. I think it will create democracy from the traditional financial systems. The problem is that because our governments are very authoritarian, they are very likely to clamp down very hard. More liberal governments are struggling with laws and regulations. For Africa it’s really going to be tough if our governments decide to clamp down. You saw what happened to Nigeria. But crypto currencies create a very unique opportunity for the unbanked in Africa. Once we can get beyond the technological huddles. I keep saying that the person who makes cryptocurrencies easy to use for someone in the village will be the one who will carry the fintech space in Africa.
RK: What challenges do you see that a lot of people in the tech space have to grapple with and what is it that governments can do to remove these challenges so that the country can benefit from these innovations?
SK: This year in particular was a bit tough. I remember for the first time in my life, we all sat in our homes and looked at each other. We realised that we are powerless. That was the first point in my life that I thought of leaving this country. I have always been told to go to China or Japan or the US that I will thrive there. But I have always said my work is in Africa. But for the first time in my life I said I am done with this country. For me that was a representation of how much we have been stifled. If you are in a place where the internet can be shut off for five days, very few investors are going to be interested in your work because they don’t know what you are doing.
To answer your questions, there are so many many roadblocks to innovation,
1. The leading among them being corruption. We need to get rid of that, I don’t know how.
2. The foundation for innovation is going to be electricity. If you don’t have consistent electricity 10km outside your city, then you have a problem. If you do not have consistent internet then you have a problem. We need to focus on infrastructure that makes innovation thrive. We are talking about access to knowledge. The arts and sciences. All that relies on that.
3. Lastly it is education. The education you have now is an indicator of the life your country is going to be in 15 – 20 years from now. If we are failing now, we are failing the country 15-20 years from now. We need to start solving these issues today. There is this famous saying that the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is now. If we don’t solve our education crisis now, we are going to have a bigger crisis in the next 10 -15 years.
RK: My final question to you this evening, this journey that you have described since we started, what have you learnt about life?
SK: The last two years have taught me how fragile humanity is. We are being brought to our knees by something we can’t see. This tragedy also is basically how we rally together as people. It has shown us how fragile our systems are; health, education, transport etc.
Everything that I have learnt in the 30 plus years of trying to solve problems, it is realising that each day these problems become more urgent. If you have a problem to solve, do it now. Each day that passes the problem gets bigger. We need people like you to step out and say I am going to stop this gap from widening. All it takes is your individual work effort, your one individual effort to have humanity in order.
RK: Solomon, like I said earlier on, I bow down for you. You are very impressive especially in the way you synthesise our problems in education. And I am really honoured to have had this conversation with you. Thank you.
SK: Same here. Thank you as well.