(Business in Cameroon) - Since 30 January 2017, Cameroonian Nji Collins Gbahn, aged 17 and a high school student in the town of Bamenda, in the North-West region, has become the very first African to win a prize created by Google, the American internet giant.

This computer genius has, in fact, been named among the winners of the Code-in Contest, which is organised annually by Google, around tasks of coding, research and documentation or user interface. This programming contest, which had 1340 candidates from 62 countries this year, is open to young people between the ages of 13 to 17.

Thanks to his triumph, obtained from a town where the internet is not as widely popularised as in Yaoundé or Douala (80% of the telecoms market in the country), the Cameroonian computer prodigy is awaited next June at the headquarters of the internet giant Google, located right in the heart of Silicon Valley, the temple of technology in the United States. Anecdotally, Nji Collins Gbah only completed his contest coding exercises for which he is finally among the laureates, on the eve of the generalised shutdown of the internet in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, marked by secessionist claims for several weeks.

BRM