Speaker.
I love sharing ideas
I speak across the territory where strategy meets building: marketing and brand, innovation and technology, governance and development cooperation, and the larger argument I call African Reconstruction — the case that Africa’s institutions and ideas must be authored from within rather than imported. What holds these together is a single interest: less in the diagnosis of what has gone wrong than in what gets built next, and who does the building. I have spent sixteen years both making these arguments and acting on them — in boardrooms, in the field on the coast, and on the page — so what I bring to a stage is work in progress, not theory kept at arm’s length.
Engagement and Leadership
I have led from the front of the room and from the back of it. I co-founded The Open Institute and ran it for twelve years, I chair the board of Publish What You Fund, and I am an Ashoka Fellow — the institutional part of the work. But the leadership I trust most is the kind tested away from the letterhead: sitting with table-banking groups along the Kilifi and Kwale coast, on land in Magarini and Lamu, where an idea either survives contact with how people actually live or it does not.
I move between the boardroom and the field on purpose because that is what keeps my strategy from becoming the thing I warn against — a plan authored at a distance from the people meant to carry it out.
