Exclusive Interview With The Chairman ‘Geeks Gone Global’

What Is Geeks Gone Global All About?

My name is Farouk , I am the Chairman, Board of Directors of ‘Geeks
Gone Global’. Geeks Gone Global is a growing conglomerate of modern
innovative company stretching from distributing energy production,
food production , aero business , I.T. companies and everything that
we feel is needed to build the most livable, advanced and independent
society in the world, we do as business. In process of identifying
what was the definition of allowing people to grow and be free , we
found out that it makes more sense for people to control the things
they need in their lives from innovation that utilize their local
material to do so. Here in Nigeria, if I could show you how to make
solar panels that you could put on the top of your roof, you will
never have to depend on generator. So in the process of developing
that company we thought who are those individuals who come up with
these great ideas? Who are innovating new ways for themselves, their
village, family and have an impact? And what we came across was
getting innovative people who are passionate about life, what they do,
passionate about anything and we respectfully call this passionate
people geeks and we don’t care what they are passionate about. They
can be passionate about agriculture. We met a young gentle man here in
Nigeria at the backyard of his house, he grows one million fishes a
year. What we found was that the problem about innovation was the
people with great ideas doing new things but having limited access to
knowledge and understanding.

We developed Geeks Gone Global to get over the geographic boundary
that inhibit propelling from being able to touch other innovative
people, bring innovative people from one country to another. We
launched the trip last year, we launched with Africa. We had the first
trip in May 2013 , we decided to cover the entire continent from
Senegal all the way down to South Africa.


We came up to Kenya and all the way to Egypt and Cairo and on the way back, we realized that we
had to extend our first trip from Africa to China and we went to the
Middle East as well. We stopped for a while there and we realized that
the problem we saw in Africa, even though people are hard on Chinese
about how they do business in Africa, are more of the problem in
Africa and we said we need to solve their problems and the reason the
Chinese are doing “bad business” in Africa is because they (Aficans)
don’t know how to solve their problems and we realized we had to focus
on the entire world. So we started Geeks Gone Global 180. Geeks gone
global 180 is an initiative to go into 180 countries and take
innovative people to innovative people even though we started with
America . During this trip there were Nigerians on our delegation that
are going from country to country with us. And also on our next trip
we already had 30 Africans that will go on our European trip with us
and we also have Japanese that are going on our lower east Shia in a
couple of months as well.

Do you think something is lacking in Africa?

There is nothing lacking in the sense of “something not there” as a
mater of fact the biggest issues from my own point of perspective in
Africa, Southern America and rural United States is that they have
everything they need but don’t know how to use it because they have
become accustomed to the concept that the best way to get what they
want is simply to run after currency. Whereas, a person would run out
of the house or a hut, step out the whole day on dirt not realizing
the innovative concept that he could use the dirt under his feet.
People need to have sincere value for what they already have and they
need to have value for their intelligence of the people because they
are extremely intelligent and they have a lot to offer.
So there’s need for the reconfiguration of individuals from
different places coming to Africa to do two things; to connect with
Africans and to gain from the knowledge with other Africans and then
the outcome from those two things is that they both realize and
appreciate the significance that independent knowledge in both people,
and I don’t believe Africa is lacking in anything. I just believe they
need to value what they already have.

What plan do you have for this year?

We started this year working with America, and with Jackie Lester who
is an African-American. So when we came here in hounour of Jackie
Lester, Shaun Jenkins who works for Africa-Atlanta Unit Initiative
suggested that we bring a group of young women to attend. This time
around, the focus was understanding the value that women entrepreneur
have and we didn’t bring people together to tell anybody what to do or
say, we brought them together to discover what’s here, to connect to
wonderful entrepreneurs on the ground and correlate with them .

What are your impressions so far?

What we found during these trips is that there is an understanding
that we have something to offer and the way to offer is to connect
with those who are already engaged.


What’s the next step of the trip?

We are going down to Johannesburg and even here in Nigeria we still
have two more days. We also visit some of the Agro business farms,
understand them a little bit better and then remind any brother out
there about the significance of appreciating knowledge.