Noah Samara

Posted by Staff Writer on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 3:20am.

Noah Samara has been called “the Rupert Murdoch of the Southern Hemisphere.” In fact, to 5 billion Africans, he is much more famous than is Murdoch, the newspaper mogul in the U.S. and U.K.

Born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian mother and a father from the Sudan, Samara is a short, wiry man who is so zealous he waves his arms arguing a point and then goes down on one knee to plead his case.

He ardently recalls listening to speakers like Kaunda, Nkrumah and Nyerere when he was just 6 years old, in the early 1960s when, quoting Thabo Mbeki, Samara says “it was a good day to be an African.” Samara is equally optimistic about the Africa’s future, especially its business future. He cites a “resiliency of hope” on the continent that is unstoppable.

At 17, Samara pursued an American education, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English from the unprepossessing East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Samara distinguished himself and was admitted to graduate school at the prestigious Georgetown University, where he earned a master’s degree in International Business and a law degree, the Doctor of Jurisprudence.

Samara promptly pursued his dreams by going to work in the field of international communications satellite law for a prominent firm. He would have continued as just another lawyer in a country full of them, except for an item in the Washington Post. That article noted the rapid spread of AIDS in Africa, mostly due to lack of information about the disease and how it spreads. Samara has said, “It became clear to me that people weren’t simply dying of disease; they were dying of ignorance.”

Samara explains the life-altering experience very simply by saying, “Something had to be done.”

Samara did it. He quit his job at 34 and devoted his “mind, body and spirit to a quest” to bring satellite radio technology to even the most remote rural villages in Africa. The project required international regulatory approval from 127 countries. It also required launching satellites, designing a new communications system, hiring staff, building a corporation. But first, it required money.

“I needed a bit of cash – hundreds of million of dollars. I was short a little – hundreds of millions of dollars.” Along the way Samara made some unique choices, quickly establishing himself as an individual not bound by convention or cowed by major corporations. He cancelled a meeting with international investment firm Morgan Stanley to meet with investors from the Middle East. Although Samara refuses to name his investors, they are rumored to include the Bin Mahfouz family, which handles investments for the Saudi royal family.

Despite his unconventional tactics, with persistence, skill and persuasive legal arguments, Samara succeeded. Samara’s company, WorldSpace, introduced satellite radio in Africa – the first time a new technology debuted on the continent before Europe or the U.S. After raising more than $2.5 billion, WorldSpace partners with media giants NPR Radio, BBC, CNN and Bloomberg. Receivers are produced by Alcatel Altsthom, Sanyo, Hitachi, JVC, and Matsushita. Despite the current poor economic climate, Samara has been instrumental in introducing other radio innovations, including XM radio.

Today, the Afri-Star satellite in low orbit transmits information on HIV virus, soap operas on reproductive health and warnings about child slavery in indigenous languages across Africa. Samara notes that almost all the information comes from African universities, with his First Network simply broadcasting their work.

Proving that nice guys don’t always finish last, Samara invariably impresses visitors as soft-spoken, charming, fervent, personable and single-minded. Samara is determined that people will no longer die from “want of information – information that is so accessible.”

Unfortunately, after a long run, Worldspace recently filed for bankruptcy while trying to stave off the effects of a global recession and Mr. Samara resigned. The visionary founder of brands like XM Radio in the United States will be on our radar.