Collymore was raised by his grandparents until age 12. When he was 16, his mother moved him to London where Collymore was the only black child in his class. It was here he experienced racial prejudice for the first time, according to Next.ft.com.
After high school, Collymore dreamed of attending a top university, but he had to pass up an offer to attend Warwick University, a public research university in Coventry, England. He didn’t qualify for financial aid. He didn’t let that hinder his ambitions. He started working as an underwriter and train announcer while pursuing his true passion — art — according to Next.ft.com.
Collymore’s is a classic story of a person working his way up the corporate ladder. His first serious job was clerical work at British Telecom. He then went to work for Cellnet in the U.K. at a time when corporations were only just beginning to take an interest in mobile phones, according to Next.ft.com.
Collymore is a member of the U.N. Global Compact Board, a voluntary U.N. initiative that aims to make corporations and large businesses adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies. For Safaricom to succeed, it needs to learn to work in a way that benefits more than just the corporation, Collymore said. He is pushing to address labor rights and tackle corruption in large corporations, hoping for “a zero degree of corruption,” according to Newafricanmagazine.com.
Collymore wants to make mobile phones and all the tools they offer–like mobile banking–available to rural communities that are off the electricity grid. He is doing this by offering Kenyans in rural communities the chance to pay for renewable energy sources in micro payments. Once that is paid off, they own the device forever and can use it to power their mobile chargers, says Newafricanmagazine.com.
As an act of good faith and to back up his fight against corruption, Collymore publicly declared his personal worth to be $2.7 million. This was part of Collymore’s effort to promote “transparency in the public and private sectors as part of efforts to fight graft in the East African region,” according to Cnbc.com.
In a controversial move, Collymore took part in an initiative to stop bribery among corporations. The initiative will demand severe penalties and punishments for any businesses that give or receive bribes, says Cnbc.com.
Many Kenyan professionals struggle to find jobs in corporations without a college degree. Collymore said he considers high school graduates and even high school dropouts to be potentially eligible job candidates. As someone who didn’t attend university, he says he’d be a hypocrite not to give others like him a chance, according to Nation.co.ke.
