01/06/2025
No Matter How Brilliant Your Child Is, If You Are Poor - He/She Might Never Amount To Much!
Truth: your poverty places a natural limit on what your child will become. This is not nice to hear, but study after study has revealed that usually the best available for brilliant kids from poor families is to work for the brilliant kids from rich families. My friend, never ever defend poverty.
I quote "Kids born into the richest 1% of society are 10 times more likely to be inventors than those born into the bottom 50% and this is having a big effect on innovation." (John Van Reenen, MIT Sloan)
Now read the quote again slowly.
This isn’t about intelligence. It’s not about school grades. It’s about exposure, access, and environment. In other words, 'poverty silences genius'.
Let’s bring this home to Africa.
1. You Can’t Invent What You’ve Never Seen
You want your child to become the next Elon Musk? How? When your home has:
- No WiFi.
- No books except textbooks.
- No Lego, no code, no telescope, no microscope, not even basic tools to take things apart and rebuild them.
They’re growing up in a world where survival, not invention, is the daily prayer. Children of the poor learn survival strategies. Meanwhile, the children of the 1% are spending their holidays in Dubai tech expos, doing coding bootcamps at age 9, and have mentors who are venture capitalists and CEOs. Genius is not always born, it's intentionally created.
2. Poor Kids Don’t Get Permission to Tinker
My elder brother struggled with maths, but he always loved dismantling watches and radios to see what's inside. He was severally beaten until he stopped. That was us in the township, but in the suburb, a child who breaks a drone is taken to a robotics camp.
So innovation becomes a class privilege not because of ability, but because one child’s curiosity is punished, and another’s is protected.
3. You Can't Innovate Under Stress
Poverty is a full-time job.
If your child is walking 4km to school with torn shoes and nothing for lunch, you expect them to invent what?
Innovation requires:
- Time to think
- Safe spaces to test and fail
- Encouragement to explore
If you can't afford your child a quite space at home, your child might grow up not knowing what they are capable of doing.
4. This Is Why Africa Isn’t Inventing at Scale
Yes, we’re hardworking. Yes, we’re spiritual. Yes, we have “potential.”
But potential without platforms is like seeds on concrete. Nothing grows.
And then we wonder why we’re importing fuel, phones, cars, tractors, vaccines, software, and even chicken pieces?
Because the kids who could invent all that are busy hustling for school fees and surviving under adults who tell them, 'you don't eat books, grow up'.
Here is what I suggest?
1. Expose Early
Get your child to familiarize yourself with a computer, see a lab, visit a factory, and attend an expo before age 10. I am taking my son to China for that.
2. Fund Curiosity
Not just education. Curiosity. Buy them a screwdriver set. Get them a science toy. Let them ruin the TV remote if it helps them figure out how circuits work. Ask them to find out how things work.
3. Celebrate problem solving.
Don’t just celebrate the child who passes exams. Celebrate the one who fixes things, builds things, questions things.
4. Normalize Invention in Black Spaces
Tech is not just for “wyts” or the diaspora. Inventing is not foreign. Our ancestors were engineers. We built kingdoms. Look at the Great Zimbabwe and the pyramids. We must now build futures.
In conclusion, until African parents start raising inventors, our children will keep buying what other people’s children built with the very money we sweat for.
In Harare I recommend Destiny Learning Centre, Westgate for your child.
Good morning.
