Googling “Mohamed Sanad Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA)” gives you hits in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Tunisia. None in Egypt. And in Arabic, Ahram has two  lines – literally: 32 words! – on him. There’s a reasonably good article in Sherouk.

So in case you hadn’t heard:

EGYPTIAN WINS INNOVATION PRIZE FOR AFRICA

 

An Egyptian engineer, Prof Mohamed Sanad has been selected as the overall winner of the Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA), bagging $ 100,000 in prize money for inventing the first small internal integrated micro strip antennas for mobile phones.
Sanad, a professor of engineering at Cairo University,  developed a low-cost, lightweight, low wind-load, foldable/deployable, multi-broadband base station antenna; using dual parabolic cylindrical reflectors with novel small size broadband resonant feeds.

 

Cheap, light and durable antenna that can carry Wimax, GSM, CDMA, and HDTV. Easy to deploy and scale up; think of how useful it could be particularly in areas where ground/cable infrastructure is weak (that is, most of the developing world).

Apparently also,

“the innovation makes it possible to upgrade mobile phone technology without having to discard equipment. For instance, the technology makes it possible to upgrade from 2G to 3G and upwards without adding new equipment, it only requires software upgrade.”

If that works as promised — then it’s an amazing development in mobile technology.

I await the day when Egypt – and the global South – requests the services of people like this man in drafting national technology policies, where infrastructure is usually the biggest hurdle.

(Oh wait, sorry, Ikhwan favours semi-educated idiots over scholars when it comes to drafting policies and constitutions…)

[also: Cairo U, Represent! :]