Ahmed Al Naanai

Egypt

“Personal choice” is not an appropriate title for the life of Ahmed Al Naanai. For 37 years, he always made choices that others wanted him to make.

On the day he graduated from high school with excellent scores, his father’s dream of Ahmed majoring in pharmacy was waiting for him. After he got his university degree, he started working long hours in his pharmacist’s white coat and was constantly preoccupied with the job.

But Ahmed’s personality longed for freedom, and while standing behind the glass countertop of medicine he kept up with the world’s technological advances. In this era’s shift to the digital world, Ahmed, like others of his generation, has seen the revolution of data, informatics and artificial intelligence. The computer was his gateway to the wider world.

About ten years ago, by himself, Ahmed learned some coding through books and the internet. It cost him a lot of time, money and effort.

Neither English nor coding language were his mother tongue. His background was far from the world of symbols and numbers, and the lessons were detailed.

Ahmed had a lot of ideas collecting dust on the shelf, such as programs that organize work data and arrange patient’s information, or applications that automatically keep track of medicine purchases and sales.

Ahmed has come a long way from those days. Today, he runs his business with programs and applications he made himself after obtaining three certificates awarded from the initiative of One Million Arab Coders.

Ahmed carries a personal connection with the platform. For him, it speaks his language on one hand and teaches him the language of the whole world on the other hand. 

Less than a year later, Ahmed has discovered that the best success stories are not always the ones you hear about. Rather, self-worth and pride in personal accomplishments are sufficient titles for his story of cultivating and refining his talents, developing skills and changing his approach. This is his success story.