Why I joined Cloudflare — and why I’m excited about Project Pangea

If you are well-prepared to take up the challenge, you will get to experience a moment where you are stepping forward to help build a better world. Personally, I felt exactly that when about a month ago, after a long and (COVID) complicated visa process, I joined Cloudflare as a Systems Engineer in Austin, Texas.

In the early 2000s, I experienced while travelling throughout the Benin Republic (my home country) and West Africa more generally, how challenging accessing the Internet was. I recall that, as students, we were often connecting to the web from cybercafés through limited bandwidth purchased at high cost. It was a luxury to have a broadband connection at home. When access was free (say, from high school premises or at university) we still had bandwidth constraints, and often we could not connect for long. The Internet can efficiently help tackle issues encountered (in areas like education, health, communications, ...) by populations in similar regions, but the lack of easy and affordable access, made it difficult to leverage. It is in such a context that I chose to pursue my studies in telecoms, with the hope of being able to somehow give back to the community by Continue reading