Pasi William Sachiti – The Zimbabwean slow learner Transformed into a Genius

Pasi William Sachiti

By Tapfuma Machakaire    31/10/2022

 

An estimated five million Zimbabweans are in the diaspora where the majority are employees, with a good number said to be doing menial jobs. In direct contrast to the bleak scenario of desperate migrants seeking greener pastures away from a derelict country, some Zimbabweans out there are now business leaders of a global magnitude. One has even scaled to the level of competing with multinationals such as Google and Tesla, Inc.

With a background of being adyslexic (a person with a learning disorder), William Sachiti transformed and rose to become the Chief Executive Officer of a driverless-car manufacturing company in London.

In an interview with Harmony Agere of the Sunday Mail in November 2016, Sachiti said he passed only three subjects at O level and recorded a U (ungraded) in mathematics.

“You might not believe it but I recall passing only three subjects at O level. I totally sucked in school. It was until I was an adult that I realized that I was very dyslexic a word I never heard mentioned in the Zimbabwean education system.”

Born in Harare on 1 May 1985, Pasihapaori William Sachiti Chidziva did his primary education at the prestigious Greystone primary school in Borrowdale and proceeded to Oriel Boys High in Chisipiti. Despite his dismal performance at O level, Sachiti graduated with a National Diploma in computer education at age 16 before leaving for the UK where he has proved that with determination, persistence and courage, nothing is impossible.

At the age of 19, Sachiti established a domain registration business called 123-Registration which he sold one year after its inception. The young man attracted public attention when he appeared on the BBC programme Dragons” Den seeking to raise 65 000 pounds. He intended to set up a solar-powered digital advertising platform for cities.

Sachiti was unable to raise the funds but he did not give up. The company operated for three years, successfully licensing its technology to six countries, before closing in 2013.

His next project was mycityvenue, a digital concierge and Holiday Company which grew to approximately 1.6 million users before it was acquired by UK holiday company Secret Escapes.

In 2015. Sachiti enrolled at Aberystwyth University in Wales, where he studied artificial intelligence and robotics. At college, he invented the world’s first artificial intelligence robot librarian which he named Hugh. The robot was capable of holding a conversation and taking verbal commands. It would navigate users to any one of several million books in the library.

Working with a team of scientists at the same college, Sachiti started working on a way to autonomously deliver packages.

He made a breakthrough in 2016 when he was funded by Aberystwyth University to establish the Academy of Robotics. The academy developed Kar-go a driverless car able to deliver multiple packages by using a combination of advanced robotics.

Kar-go which has been nominated for several awards is domiciled in Small Dole near Brighton in the UK. On the project, the academy partnered with Pilgrim Motorsports a company that specializes in the production of vehicles. Kar-go was developed in collaboration with the UK’s vehicle licensing authority, the DVLA, to travel on the roads at up to about 96km/h.

In 2018 Sachiti appeared at the National Assembly for Wales, where he discussed with law makers,The State of Self-Driving Vehicles – Automation and the Welsh Economy.The discussion was featured live on Welsh Senate television.

Kar-go was launched in July 2019 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where it was hailed as Europe’s first street-legal self-driving vehicle. “The problem we are trying to solve is that in the world of delivery, up to 80 percent of the cost of getting a parcel to you occurs in the last mile. We want to remove that cost by automating the process of delivery entirely.” Sachiti told Techzim magazine.

He said Kar-go has software that allows it to navigate on unmarked country roads and even without GPS. “It works in conjunction with an app, where recipients can track their delivery and meet the vehicle just like meeting a pre-booked taxi. Recipients will then use the app to open the hatch to release their specific parcel. Inside the vehicle, a patented package management system will sort and re-shuffle packages on the move” said Sachiti.

On 12 July  2019 the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sibusiso Moyo, now late accompanied by Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to the UK Christian Katsande inspected the Kar-go vehicle at an exclusive reception hosted at the Westbury Mayfair hotel in London.

Sachiti says he often visits his home country Zimbabwe to see his mother and brother. He said on his last visit he recorded footage of driving on the roads in Harare. “We use this footage to have a driverless car teach itself how to drive on roads with potholes.There are some great delivery robots out there, but most of them are designed to run on neat pavements or sidewalks of grid-like cities. We want Kar-go to be universally applicable, so we have trained our technology in a number of different environments and of course, for me, Zimbabwe was a natural choice,” he said.

In November 2019, Sachiti toured the UK with Kar-go and was pictured demonstrating the vehicle to the UK Transport Secretary Michael Matheson at a Glasgow CAV event and then in London with Mayor Sadiq Khan.

Later in the same year,Sachiti travelled to Warsaw, Poland where he gave a lecture at a university college which awarded him the title of Honorary Teacher

In February 2020, Sachiti published an 18 page white-paper titled ‘Trees of Knowledge’. The paper, detailed his invention to improve access to education using micro-computing, an A.I. assistant and ‘clever software’ to turn landmarks such as trees into hubs of educational content.

The innovation was designed to help play a part in educating some of the 32 million children in Africa. Sachiti released the invention as an open-source, free-to-develop technology free of patents. The technology uses trees to broadcast the pre-loaded educational content stored on the micro-computer to allow anyone in the vicinity access to the digital store of information using any mobile device.

The technology is molded into trees using a process called potting to protect it from theft or damage.

In November 2020, Academy of Robotics, became the first company to have a made-to-be-autonomous vehicle approved for use in the United Kingdom by the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency.

The British Royal Air Force recently announced that it was going to use Sachiti”s technology to make self driving deliveries in UK airbases.

This was followed by an offer by the UK Ministry of Defence to Sachiti to acquireRAF Neatishead, the former cold war military base spanning over 10hectares. Sachiti also acquired the two nuclear bunkers on site with a combined underground floor space of over 2 hectares. The bunkers are classified as listed buildings by the UK government.

Reporting on the purchase deal, the BBC and Forces News rana story with the headline “Heart of Britain’s Cold War defence’s gets new life as launch pad for cutting-edge tech”

In late 2021 the company was listed to be valued at approximately 100 million pounds with Sachiti being the majority shareholder.

Sachiti who has been described as an ideal celebrity influencer is one of the world’s most influential social media stars.

In 2017, Sachiti got the award for the Aberystwyth InvEnter Prize for ‘Kar-go’ and in the same year, he was nominated for the Wales Start-up Awards for the most innovative start-up in Wales.

It might defy logic that the boy who was a slow learner is now an expert in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and head of an internationally renowned think tank. This should certainly raise questions about the efficiency of our education system and how the system can deal with slow learners who are placed in what are termed, special classes. What a legend Zimbabwe has in Pasihapaori William Sachiti Chidziva!