Several years ago, my wife was driving our children to school when a car rear-ended her. The whiplash was minor. The shock was not. Somewhere in the vehicle, a sensor registered the G-force and fired a signal, and within moments, her phone rang. It was the call centre. They had detected an impact, and they needed her to file a statement.
Consider the state she was in. Dishevelled, rattled, her mind everywhere at once, wondering whether the children were hurt. That is precisely the wrong moment to ask a human being to behave like an efficient node in a claims process. The technology had worked exactly as designed. It simply had not been designed around the person it was meant to serve.
I have thought about that call for years, because it holds the whole of what I believe about technology. Picture a different version of the same event. What if the signal that pinged the call centre had instead dispatched a drone?
What if, by the time she had caught her breath, the accident had already been photographed, mapped, plotted and logged, and the only thing left for her to do was press “OK” before driving on?
Same technology. Same data. Same insurance company. A completely different starting point. One begins with what the system needs. The other begins with what the person feels. Closing that gap is the work of my career.
Two realities, one truth
I spent roughly four years standing up Facebook’s office in South Africa, with a mandate that stretched across sub-Saharan Africa. I have described that period as living in a permanent state of depression and inspiration at once.
On one side, a seat inside what was arguably the best technology company on earth, and a front-row view of boardrooms across the continent bracing for a future they could not quite name. More than one executive asked me, only half joking, when Facebook was going to become a bank.
On the other side, the daily reality of a region carrying more unsolved problems than almost anywhere in the world.
When I left, I crystallised three convictions about Africa’s future. It will be built on creativity, technology, and empathy. Those three golden threads run through everything I do and live large in the businesses I own and lead.
My aim is not to hand anyone answers. It is to get us asking better questions. This is a loop that goes round and round in my mind. Over the years, I have come to call it the Kalenga Conundrum – as technology accelerates and gets exponentially better, why is the state of humanity not improving at the same rate?
A puzzle wrapped in a mystery
Picture two lines on a graph. The first tracks human wellbeing, the Human Development Index, the number that serious institutions recalculate each year to describe how we are doing as a species. It slopes gently upward. On the whole, we are getting better. But the lowest line on that chart, the one furthest from where it ought to be, is sub-Saharan Africa. Improving, yes, but still last, also yes.
The second line is technology, and it does not slope so much as launch. From the printing press to 3D printing, from machine learning to AI, it is the steep curve that makes investors reach for their chequebooks: two lines, radically different gradients.
Lay one over the other, and the space between them is the conundrum. It is the reason we can send people to the moon but cannot feed people on Earth. The conundrum is why we keep building astonishing things while losing sight of the humans they are supposedly for.
The danger is not that technology fails. It succeeds brilliantly at things that do not move the human line at all. Keep the conundrum in your sights, and you build differently. Lose it, and you produce impressive machinery with no meaningful effect on anyone’s life.
What the acronym API really means
Here, the metaphor I keep returning to arrives. To most people, API is inscrutable jargon. For the record, it stands for application programming interface. Strip away the acronym, though, and it means something close to poetic: the ability to plug things together and, out of that connection, create new value.
The everyday proof is Uber. Not one clever app, but roughly 37 different APIs stitched into a single, seamless experience. The value emerges from the connections, not the parts.
Now take that idea beyond software and turn it on ourselves. What happens if you treat a person as an API, a conduit built to connect, to plug into others and generate something neither could alone? You begin to experience the world differently. You stop measuring people the way we do now.
In the near future, I suspect the prized trait will not be competency but cooperability. Can you work inside a team utterly foreign to you and still contribute something that helps solve the problem?
On this score, diversity is not a moral nicety but a competitive advantage. It is where the hardest problems actually get solved, which makes resilience in collaborating across differences the metric that matters.
I can imagine wearable technology turning the old marketing focus group into something closer to an empathy session, reading how people genuinely feel rather than what a watching executive assumes they feel, cutting past language and intimidation towards real understanding.
I can imagine an era where geography dissolves, where a holoport prototype beams an expert into your boardroom for the price of a fast-food meal. Together, you work out how to pivot and grow your business exponentially before they disappear.
The specific predictions matter less than the sensibility beneath them. A generation is arriving that already sees the world as connected, as a set of interoperable parts, and instinctively works by plugging in. If you cannot plug in alongside them, you will fall behind.
Three eras, one direction
To better understand the whole arc of technology, the work of Maurice Conti (futurist) tends to divide it into three phases.
First, passive technology, where a person had to pour their own will into an object to get anything from it. The effort was all yours.
Then generative technology, which I locate in something as humble as the first computer mouse. Draw a smiley face, open a document, the best of the human and the best of the machine making something together.
And now the age of AI-driven intuition, where, with enough data and computing power, systems can begin solving problems people do not yet know they have.
That is the frontier I want African builders to claim. Intuitive technology aimed squarely at human problems. Do that, and the next five to ten years offer a genuine chance to leapfrog the rest of the world, on precisely the terrain where the continent lost the last two hundred years.
Empathy before insight
If one discipline makes all of this work, it is empathy, and I am pointed about how rare it is in practice. The industry default is insight.
Take a taxi into a township, observe how people live, extract a few tidy learnings, run a campaign. Or convene a focus group, put people in a fishbowl, and decide from behind the glass what they will like.
Empathy is a different act entirely. It asks whether you can stand in someone else’s shoes and walk the road they have walked. And it is honest enough to admit that sometimes you cannot, in which case the job is to surround yourself with people who can.
Empathy is a muscle. Start from it, and marketing’s dark arts of persuasion begin to make sense. Start from it, and only then does technology become your friend. Do it the other way around, as many have, and the results are disastrous.
Learn, unlearn, relearn.
So I will leave you with a challenge I borrow from Alvin Toffler, who argued that, in the future, illiteracy would not be about reading and writing but about the capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Take from this piece what you need to learn. Identify what you have to unlearn. And spend real time relearning the things that make us more human.
That is the whole wager of the API humanity. Not that Africa should copy technology, but rather that it builds the next wave from a different starting point. The human in the wrecked car. The line on the chart that is still the lowest. The person you are actually trying to serve. And, in doing so, we finally close the gap together.
