FRED DE SAM LAZARO:

Patrick Awuah was born and raised in Ghana, but came to the United States on scholarship to get an undergraduate degree in engineering from Swarthmore and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to become a program manager at Microsoft.

When he decided to return to his homeland, he assumed he would start a software company, but quickly realized the system of higher education was so poor, there wasn't a competent work force to hire.

Experts say the problem with education in Africa is not so much that there aren't enough institutions, but, rather, it's in what students are taught and how they're taught it, with an emphasis much more on rote learning and memorization, much less on critical thinking, on thinking for oneself.