Meet 6-year-old Damilare Akano, Africa’s youngest Microsoft specialist

At age six, Damilare Akano is Africa’s youngest Microsoft Specialist in the Certiport international certification examination. The examination was organised by New Horizons Nigeria, a subsidiary of New Horizons in the United States, the world’s largest ICT training organisation, at its just-ended summer camp in Lagos, Vanguard Nigeria reports.

Out of 200 pupils, the six-year-old Nigerian student emerged first in the Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2016 examinations. The exam was scored over 1000 points and Damilare scored 871points.

The primary one pupil was followed immediately by a 10-year-old boy, Master Toluwalese Ayoola Kwaku with 825 points while Kolawole Praise Akano, an eight-year-old, came in third with 800 points.

According to the Vanguard, the top three winners are all students of Scholar Crest International in Lagos, one of the many educational institutions supported by New Horizon.

Managing Director of New Horizons, Tim Akano, said the accomplishment of the six-year-old Damilare as Africa’s 2019 youngest Microsoft Certified Office Specialist is no mean feat even though it was much anticipated due to the adequate training he received from New Horizons.

The company, as part of its aims, seeks to bridge the ICT gap in Nigeria. To that effect, the company has trained almost 75% of Nigeria’s ICT professionals.

In Nigeria, New Horizons equips over 50,000 pupils yearly in over 100 schools and 15 universities to achieve academic success, the Nation line reports.

The month-long summer camp, dubbed ‘Nextgen IT Experts’ and facilitated by the Learning Systems Institute, New Horizons, trained its participants on a wide range of Information and communication technology like Microsoft, Multimedia, Robotics Engineering, Drone Technology, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Coding, among others.

Damilare is among a number of exceptional young people who have broken the status quo and achieved the unthinkable in technology.

In 2016, Nji Collins Gbah of Cameroon became the first African to win the prestigious Google Code-In competition.

Gbah was one of 34 winners around the world to win the grand prize despite the partial internet shutdown in his country. Two years after, a 10-year-old South African girl, Karabo Matlali, built and developed a moving robot.

Matlali, who was introduced to coding by her parents, used two months to build the robot and said she had to consider many variables such as the weight and length of the robot in order to give the correct instructions for it to move.

Last month, news emerged that Basil Okpara Jr, a 9-year-old boy from Lagos, Nigeria, had built over 30 mobile games.

After showing interest in learning how to make his own games, Basil’s father bought him a laptop and registered him to learn the basics of building games.

“I learned how to build games at a boot camp. Now, I build to keep me busy when I am bored,” Basil told CNN.

This month, Emmanuella Mayaki, a 10-year-old Nigerian girl, was offered a teaching job at Southfields Primary School, Coventry, England. The young tech genius got appointed to teach after she was discovered to be computer proficient.