I am a technology leader, machine learning researcher, and founder. For fifteen years, one thread has run through everything I build, invest in, and study: using emerging technologies to improve socioeconomic outcomes on the African continent.
Fifteen years across building, founding, investing, and researching — connected by a single conviction: emerging technologies must improve the lives of the people they touch. Each chapter feeds the next.
The story starts unglamorously: deploying and babysitting more than 100 virtual private servers — cloud computing before most people called it that — keeping them alive around the clock and fending off hackers. From Limpopo to Cape Town, what stuck was a conviction that infrastructure is never just infrastructure. Behind every server is someone's livelihood.
At Accenture, I advised the CIOs and CFOs of South Africa's largest listed companies and government departments — thirteen programmes across banking, telecoms, and the public sector. It was an education in the machinery of institutional decision-making: why organisations adopt the technologies they do, and who bears the consequences.
Every year, thousands of South African learners drop out before matric, and youth unemployment exceeds 60%. I co-founded Gradesmatch to attack this directly — a data-driven platform mapping career information to learners, parents, and mentors, free and zero-rated for disadvantaged learners.
Today it is South Africa's leading career-guidance technology company: over a million users, roughly a hundred jobs created, recognised by the Google.org Impact Challenge, the MultiChoice Innovation Fund, and HolonIQ's Africa Top 50.
At the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, I was one of three architects of a national strategy for tackling youth unemployment — applying behavioural economics and micro-credentialing to a generational crisis. Then, as an executive at the Technology Innovation Agency, I directed South Africa's public ICT investments toward AI and wireless technologies aimed squarely at economic growth, jobs, and inclusion — and turned the worst-performing unit in the agency into its best.
At Deloitte Africa, I rose from leading cloud analytics to Partner — today the firm's Technology Strategy & Transformation Leader, guiding digital transformation across organisations in South, West, and East Africa. The work has continental scale: an MLOps platform spanning 22 countries, 1,500 applications modernised across three continents, cloud strategy for the South African Reserve Bank, and AI systems with direct human stakes — computer vision that reduces mining fatalities, models that detect fraud.
Industry moves fast; rigour keeps it honest. Alongside the day jobs, I studied inclusive innovation, completed a machine learning master's with distinction in a single year, and earned a doctorate in computer science (2025) — while supervising fifteen postgraduate researchers and publishing eight peer-reviewed papers.
The questions were never purely technical: stokvels as vehicles of economic mobility, information systems in the 2008 xenophobic attacks, machine learning to forecast South Africa's unemployment rate. Research, for me, is how a practitioner stays honest about what the technology is actually doing to people.
Research means little if it stays in the journal. I have presented on four continents, been featured on national radio, television, and print, and spoken to audiences ranging from thirty-person boardrooms to forums of thousands — always translating between the deeply technical and the fully human.
Three lines of inquiry, one question underneath them all: how do we make consequential technologies serve the people they touch?
Four peer-reviewed papers applying deep learning, Bayesian, and statistical methods to forecast the South African unemployment rate — presented in Melbourne, London, Kolkata, and at home.
A phenomenological study of South Africa's community savings networks and their potential as vehicles of economic mobility — research that travelled from the academy to national radio, TV, and print.
An early exploration of the quality of information flowing through ICTs during the Western Cape attacks — and what it reveals about technology's role in anticipating social crisis.
Nonprofit tech accelerator developing young African tech talent, startups, and digital skills.
Governance of South Africa's leading career-guidance EdTech and its nonprofit arm.
High-impact data analytics solutions for the development sector.
Youth-led NGO improving STEM education outcomes in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng.