Between the policy and the delivery. Between an institution and the field it says it serves. Between a narrative that reads well and one that moves ministers, capital and markets. That is where I work, and I build from the Global South outward rather than toward it.
Most of the advice written about this continent still treats it as a place that is catching up. That framing produces predictable work: pilots that never scale, campaigns that flatter the funder, communiqués that read beautifully and change nothing. It also produces bad strategy, because it starts from the wrong protagonist.
I start from the other end. A billion people are building payment rails, identity systems, data exchanges and markets in real time, under constraints that would break most institutions, and they are doing it without the century of industrial buildout other economies took for granted. That is not a gap to be closed. It is a design position, and it is the more interesting one.
My work sits where that position gets won or lost: in the joins between policy and delivery, between the technical and the political, between what an institution intends and what a market actually experiences. Eighteen years of it, across ministries, multilateral processes, funders, founders and newsrooms.
Service to humanity is the best work of life. Everything else is positioning.
I take a small number of engagements a year. Each of these starts as somebody's stuck problem rather than a service line.
Positioning and narrative strategy for institutions entering, reshaping or defending a market. I find the frame that makes the decision obvious to the people who have to make it, then build the evidence, the language and the sequence that carries it into ministries, boardrooms and press. Persuasion is designed here, not hoped for.
Convening as an instrument of policy. I design and produce high-level formats, ministerial dialogues, summits and country consultations, engineered backward from the commitment you need on the last day. I have run these in twenty countries, including bringing a continental summit to a market that had never hosted one and standing up the first Global DPI Summit for 700 delegates from 101 countries. The largest I have worked on carried 10,000 delegates. The smallest carried twelve, and mattered more.
Public diplomacy and multi-country campaigns built on behavioural design rather than message discipline alone. Ambassador and practitioner-led models, local production, and measurement that tracks perception and behaviour instead of impressions. The instinct is to decentre the institution and foreground the people doing the work.
Advisory on digital public infrastructure, the AI agenda and the politics around both. Translating between the engineers, the treasuries, the regulators and the public, and helping funders, governments and platforms position themselves in a field where the vocabulary is still being set. I sit on two boards in adjacent territory, which keeps me on the governance side of the table as well as the advisory one.
A strategy system I built by putting three traditions in the same room: military doctrine, consulting rigour, and behavioural economics. It assumes people are not rational actors. They are meaning-seeking, status-conscious and identity-signalling, and they decide with emotion then justify with logic. Strategy that ignores this is fiction.
Know the terrain and the psychology moving through it. Not only what people do, but what doing it signals about who they are.
Direction that people can carry as identity, not only as an objective. A leader is a dealer in hope, and hope has to be specific.
Win without fighting. Position where comparison becomes difficult, then make the trade-offs that create real focus.
Speed is the strategy. Remove psychological friction, not only operational friction, and decentralise decisions to the edge.
Small reframings with disproportionate returns. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
Measure what matters to humans, not what is easy to count. Feed it back into intelligence so the strategy compounds.
The test I apply to any proposal, mine included: what actually moves the needle? Most strategy documents are overengineered. The right answer is usually the simplest mechanism that produces the outcome metric, and it is usually less impressive to look at.
I am not a hired voice. I know the content, I know the stakeholders, and I ask panellists the question the room is actually thinking. Comfortable with protocol at head-of-state level, and comfortable breaking it when the session needs air. Themes: digital public infrastructure, AI and the fourth industrial revolution, pan-African policy and the AfCFTA, innovation ecosystems, youth and workforce development, inclusive growth.
I write to pressure-test my own positions in public. The pieces that matter start from a specific arguable claim rather than a theme, and most of them are trying to dislodge something the field has stopped examining. Two poetry collections sit alongside the policy writing, which tells you most of what you need to know about how I think.
A weekly read of what actually moved on the continent, and what it means, produced and presented by me. Thirty-seven episodes in. It exists because the continent's week is still mostly narrated from outside it, in a register that treats African decisions as symptoms rather than choices. It is also the clearest statement of how I work. Roughly two thirds of my effort goes to advancing the field rather than to positioning whoever is paying me, and this is what that looks like when nobody is paying me at all.
Governments and ministries, multilateral banks and UN agencies, continental institutions, foundations, global networks and private companies, across eighteen years. A few towards the end are ventures I built myself, which I would rather show than hide.
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Tell me what is stuck. If I am the wrong person for it, I will say so in the first conversation and point you at someone better. Advisory retainers, campaign and convening mandates, board seats, and stage bookings.
