From Demo to Dream: Intel PCs Give African Entrepreneurs New Life

Intel shipped 180 PCs to the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show. These new and powerful PCs are among the hundreds that will be shipped around the world this year to demo Intel tech for customers, media and analysts.

It’s light duty for a PC – a few days of work at events and early retirement to an Oregon supply closet when the next generation arrives.

“It really kind of hurts my soul a little bit knowing how many of these platforms we have, and the light use they're getting,” says Nick Blair, director of Technical Marketing in Intel’s Performance Marketing Lab.

For years, the second lives of retired PCs were limited: They went to teams or execs so they could experience the latest features, were broken down for parts, or were donated to nonprofit tech refurbishment organizations such as Portland, Oregon’s Free Geek, with others recycled as electronic waste.

Today, some of these PCs – most just a few years old – avoid those fates. In 2024, 20 retired demo PCs arrived in Africa as part of a donation to give the laptops a second life and young African entrepreneurs a leg up.

And more will be on the way. Blair says, “We have shelves along the walls three laptops deep, and there’s probably six piles on each shelf.”

Tony Abuta, who has roots and family in Kenya, lives in Oregon and works in Intel’s Edge Computing Group’s Cities and Critical Infrastructure Division. He says the word “amsha,” a Swahili term that means “wake up,” perfectly describes the nonprofit he helped co-found in 2008, the Amsha Africa Foundation, or AAF.

“There's so much talent, there are so many opportunities in Africa,” Abuta says. “And just because of the history of what's going on there, that talent needs to be woken up so they can take advantage of the opportunities they have.”

AAF works with community groups, other nonprofits and government agencies in some of Africa’s poorest areas. The group provides water sanitation and hygiene programs, self-help workshops, health checkups, child abuse and neglect prevention, and education, as well as professional development.

Every year, half of all graduates in Africa struggle to land a job. AAF’s Africa Gigsters program helps them find online job opportunities from business owners outsourcing freelance gigs like graphic design, drafting, writing or web development. A computer is essential to most professional work, but the cost of even the most basic PC can be out of reach for many in Africa.

Abuta saw the need and connected with Blair. Together, they made a plan to ship those 20 demo laptops to AAF’s Gigsters program. When the PCs arrived in Kenya in February 2024, they immediately started making a difference.

“The cool thing about it is, you give one laptop and a lot of them share their knowledge with their families,” Abuta says. “We gave a laptop to this one girl and within a few months, her mother, her dad, the siblings had all learned something and they were all using it. It was just amazing to see how just a single laptop can propagate generations.”

The successful 2024 donation has changed how Intel’s Performance Marketing Lab looks at aged-out laptops. Team members now proactively set aside systems that would be perfect as donations. This year, they’re gathering between 30 and 50 PCs for a spring donation to AAF.

“The next genius, the next person who will invent something that’s revolutionary, is somewhere in Africa or somewhere in an underrepresented community. All we need to do is equip them with that technology and just have them learn and follow their passion,” says Abuta.