Alumnus gives back by collecting phones for those in need in Congo

Most Americans take their cellphones for granted, seeing them as a necessity for our always-connected 21st-century lives. But the cost of a phone remains out of reach for many people in economically disadvantaged countries, limiting their ability to apply for jobs, keep in touch with family and feel part of the wider world.

Innocent Kukulu ’22 is looking to change that paradigm through his plan to collect discarded phones in the U.S. and redistribute them to recipients in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Kukulu knows what it’s like to face his own hardships and overcome them, so it’s important for him to offer a helping hand to others.

In 2000, when he was 4 years old, he and his family fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo as fighting with neighboring Rwanda erupted into the Great African War, which involved nine countries and 25 armed militia groups. His mother — a Rwandan — took refuge in Belgium, while he and his three brothers traveled with his father to Brooklyn, New York.

Eventually reunited, his family settled in the Stapleton Houses, the New York City Housing Authority‘s largest housing project on Staten Island. The poverty, terrible living conditions and crime at Stapleton led to new challenges.

“I found ways to navigate myself by sticking to sports and being very committed to my schoolwork,” Kukulu said. “I also got some guidance from a lot of good leaders, and I found myself being a really good athlete. That’s what drove me to figure out my path as far as academics.”

At Staten Island’s Curtis High School, he was a starting basketball player for half his junior season and all his senior season, helping his team reach the borough championship and city playoffs both years. He earned a basketball scholarship to Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black, Catholic college in New Orleans often called “the Harvard of the South.”

The experience was very different from Staten Island, Kukulu said: “I got to immerse myself in the amazing culture of New Orleans, meet a lot of different people, pick up a lot of communication skills, and just enjoy the city as well.”

He played three seasons as a guard with the Gold Rush while studying physics at Xavier before coming to Binghamton University. Xavier does not offer engineering degrees, so it partners with other engineering institutions — including Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science — that admit qualified science students interested in pursuing a dual bachelor’s.

Because he wanted to pursue mechanical engineering, Kukulu received a scholarship through the Smart Energy Scholars Program, a program funded by the National Science Foundation designed to assist low-income, academically talented students as they explore sustainable innovation and research.

“I’ve always been somebody who likes to tear things apart and see how they work and really get into the nitty-gritty of them,” he said. “I saw an opportunity in high school to kind of take that to a more professional field and really help people on a greater scale. I’ve always been passionate about being a creative person, and I saw this as a good way to combine the creativity with the technical background and create something for people that can change their lives.”

In the summer of 2021, after his junior year, Kukulu got to return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the first time since his family left, and he calls it “an eye-opening experience.”

“It was surreal, like a nostalgic feeling of somewhere I didn’t know but I kind of knew — it was so weird,” he said.

While there, he saw first-hand the struggles that the DRC continues to have. The Great African War and its aftermath caused 5.4 million deaths, principally through disease and malnutrition, making it the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Another 2 million were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in other countries.

Despite a peaceful transition of power to an elected president in 2018, tribal conflicts and militia fighting have made rebuilding the country difficult.

“The infrastructure is not there,” Kukulu said. “There are electricity problems, there are power generation problems and the grid systems aren’t stabilized. But where I saw the most immediate help was when I ran into my cousins, and they all were asking me for cell phones. I’m like, ‘I can’t give you guys phones at $1,000 a pop! I’ll give you the clothes off my back, but I need this cellphone.’”

He also did some research and learned that the DRC’s largest export is raw minerals, including one that is crucial to cellphones and other mobile devices.

“About 65% of the cobalt used to produce lithium-ion batteries comes from there,” he said. “This can’t be good for their economy, because if cobalt is sold worldwide, why is this country still struggling? They’re violating human rights and causing environmental issues, and you have countries like China profiting billions of dollars and damaging supply chains all over the world because of their eagerness to get as much cobalt out of the ground as possible.”

His cousins’ requests gave him an idea, and when he returned to the U.S., he began a project to collect unused phones and ship them to the DRC. He called it Apesana, a form of the verb “kopésa,” which means “to give” in the Congolese language of Lingala.

“I thought it’d be a cool way to bridge the gap between the two countries and also allow them to enjoy some of the technologies that are being created using minerals from the Congo,” he said.

Because he was part of a dual-degree program, Kukulu earned in May both a BS in physics from Xavier and a BS in mechanical engineering with a minor in sustainability from Binghamton. This summer, he’s doing research at the University on different methods to cool down electronic devices that experience overheating because of poor thermal management. In September, he’ll join The Raymond Corporation as an energy electrical systems engineer.

In his downtime, he is working out more details for Apesana. So far, he has collected and redistributed about two dozen phones, mainly to people he already knows in the DRC, but he would like to expand the donor base and make more connections like the one he has to FedEx that makes shipping the phones cheaper.

As the effort grows, it also is important to ensure that donors’ private information is wiped from their phones before being passed on to new owners.

“Whoever receives those phones sends back some kind of thanks to let donors know how much it means that they’re providing such a necessity,” Kukulu said. “The goal is to reach more people, but as long as we’re making an impact with someone, I think it’s a great thing for sure. It’s going to change people’s lives.”