‘Build Anyway’: Resilience and ethical engineering lessons from a top African entrepreneur

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At the inaugural Babatunde Ogunnaike Memorial Lecture at the University of Delaware on September 15, Sangu Delle made a few things clear: “Applause is temporary. Responsibility is permanent. Awards are vanity. Service is the point.” 

Delle, the CEO of CarePoint, founder of Golden Palm Investments and honorary member of the Ogunnaike family, was chosen to deliver the talk, which wove stories of Ghana, Delaware and beyond into a call to “build anyway,” even in the face of societal setbacks. 

The lecture, held at Audion Tower at STAR Campus, honored the late Ogunnaike, UD’s former dean of engineering and a highly respected figure in the field, by carrying forward his belief that engineering is about more than problem-solving. It is about character, community and hope. 

Delle’s stories range from rural Ghanaian water projects to high-tech healthcare systems. A three-time honoree in Forbes top 30 most promising entrepreneurs in Africa and author of Making Futures: Young Entrepreneurs in a Dynamic Africa, he urged the audience to see integrity not as an individual virtue but as a system that must be designed into our institutions. 

Echoing the spirit of Ogunnaike — who, as a young professor at the University of Lagos in 1985, wrote a whole textbook by hand because there was no budget for books — he challenged students and engineers alike to “build boldly, fail with integrity and lead with courage.” 

‘Build anyway’

Delaware, and the US in general, can learn much from Africa, Delle said, and from the lessons of his leadership at Ashesi University, Africa’s pioneering institution for ethical engineering education in Ghana.

“Brilliance is evenly distributed — opportunity is not,” Delle told Technical.ly. “I’ve traveled to 110 countries, and every single one has been a master class. I’ve learned as much from Nobel Prize winners at Harvard and Oxford as from uneducated, illiterate old people in villages in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia.”

During the lecture, Delle recalled building a massive church and community center in his hometown in one of Ghana’s poorest regions. Then a violent storm ripped through the site, destroying months of work and nearly $100,000 in materials. 

The setback, he said, became a lesson in resilience.

“We decided to rebuild for the world that is coming, not the one we wish we still had,” he said. “Even though it means 30% to 40% higher cost and a longer timeline, stronger trusses, deeper anchors, better drainage. A building that will hold, because, friends, this is life: setbacks, and then we build anyway.”

‘Make the table longer, not the walls higher’

In the end, the message returned to Ogunnaike’s legacy that engineering is as much about hope as it is about equations. 

“You will be told the storms will only get worse,” Delle said. “Build anyway, designed for the storm you fear, not the breeze you remember. You will be told that people are too divided. Build anyway. Make the table longer, not the walls higher. You will be told that nothing you do will matter. Build anyway, because someone somewhere is waiting on the other side of your decision.

“But here is the deeper truth: Building is not just bricks and budgets. Building is a moral act. It declares we are not done with each other. It says tomorrow is worth the work.”