The teenager who built his own phone

A 17-year-old boy from Canada who built his own phone after his Somalian mother said she couldn’t afford to buy him a smartphone has been speaking to the BBC.

Mo Omer – who calls himself a “tech nerd” – built a smartphone from scratch, and says he will sell it at just $180 (£133).

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“It’s got everything you’d find in a normal phone, it just doesn’t cost nearly as much,” he told the BBC.

Phones “are not very complicated devices”, he added – and says he’d had interest from parts of Africa.

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“We’ve had offers from Nigeria and Algeria and a lot of other places. It’s a rapidly growing market that we’d love to get into”.

You can hear Mo on BBC Focus on Africa radio later today.