He might have been content simply to teach thousands of university students in Uganda how to use computers, assemble them into networks, manage them and write basic software programs. In a poor African country with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations and rising Internet use, that alone would have been an enormous achievement.

But Venansius Baryamureeba had bigger ideas. In 2005, when he returned home with a doctorate from the University of Bergen in Norway, he was just one of a handful of computer scientists in Uganda. And his timing was right. The largely agricultural economy had been growing by about 7 percent annually, propelling an enormous expansion of the upper middle class and the urban elite’s aspirations for advanced training in science and engineering..... read more