In our rapidly changing world, leadership is no longer just about guiding teams or managing businesses; it’s about harnessing the power of technology and human-centered innovation to address some of the globe’s most pressing challenges.
In a recent conversation with Fred Swaniker, founder and CEO of Sand Technologies, I was reminded of the pivotal role that leaders play in shaping the future, not just for their organizations, but for society at large. Fred’s work, especially in Africa, demonstrates how technology, innovation, and leadership can converge to empower individuals, communities, and nations. From making education more affordable and accessible to tackling healthcare and infrastructure issues, his insights are an inspiration for all of us seeking to create a meaningful impact.
In this issue of The Exchange, we will explore Fred’s transformative ideas, seeded in actionable impact, and reflect on the key takeaways that can inspire business leaders worldwide to think bigger and lead more effectively.
Tell us a little bit about how you started Sand Technologies.
I was inspired to start Sand Technologies because I’ve always been driven by a passion for solving tough societal problems. My mantra in the different organizations I’ve started before is: Do hard things. This comes from a belief that those of us who are privileged to be educated, to be alive, to be healthy, and to have good networks can justify our privilege by doing hard things, creating opportunities for others, solving the big issues, and not doing small things.
When I looked at a lot of the conversation around AI, I felt it solved a lot for us, but that the focus was on the technology itself rather than the problems it solved. Sand Technologies aims to solve big issues beyond chatbots, entertainment, writing poems, or using ChatGPT. Rather, we are thinking about how to use AI to build smart cities, for climate change, or for health, or for telecommunications access—the really big issues where you can see significant value creation if you’re a for-profit company, or significant impact if you’re a city or state government. That’s what prompted us to start Sand Technologies.
What is the role that Sand Technology plays in helping to solve the education problem?
One of the biggest challenges we face as a global society is how to support the two to three billion people growing up in emerging countries like Africa, India, and Latin America, where the average age is much younger than in the rest of the world. The average age in Africa is 19, compared with 38 in the US and 48 in Japan and Germany. When you look at places like Africa, it’s going to be home to 40 percent of the world’s population and will have a workforce larger than that of China and India in the next decade.
We embarked on a mission to train the next generation of talent starting in Africa, but we developed a global solution that we are now starting to bring to the US and even to other parts of the world. We’re developing software engineers, data scientists, cloud computing talent, cybersecurity, and so forth. And we’re able to develop talent that can compete at global levels, at about 1 percent of the cost. That’s a radical innovation.
For context, we acquired a school in Silicon Valley that was training engineers for Amazon, Apple, NASA, and Tesla. The graduates were earning more than those from Stanford, Caltech, and Yale, and people in the US were paying $85,000 a year for that certification. We brought that program to Africa and, leveraging technology, we’ve delivered the same curriculum and are training world-class engineers for $200 a year. We haven’t changed the curriculum or assessments one bit. It’s the same material, and technology allows us to do this.
We built an infinitely scalable learning system and are producing very high-quality talent at a very low cost. This is just one example of how technology and AI can be used to solve a major societal problem.
You mentioned insights on students. Could you talk more about the technologies that allow you to make such a difference?
First, and obviously, was the advent of the internet itself. Today, a child in a rural area in Africa can access the internet on a mobile phone. They can access thousands of libraries around the world. They can access much more information than someone earning a PhD at Oxford 30 years ago. At that time, we lived in a world where access to information was scarce. Thanks to the internet, information became ubiquitous, and everyone had access to it. That was the first big game changer.
With cloud computing, you could curate the best professors in the world in one place, along with open courses and platforms such as YouTube. Students sitting anywhere in the world—Bangalore, Chennai, New York—were no longer constrained only to professors at nearby universities; they could find the best instructors in the world in one place.
Then, of course, came the advent of data science and analytics: we were able to do much more assessment and track outcomes. I know every day who’s engaged, who showed up, who didn’t. You can track who’s performing and who isn’t. You can use adaptive learning: Give people more challenging material when they’re bored or doing well, and give those who are struggling more remedial work. You can do all those personalized paths that you couldn’t do without analytics.
Finally, with gen AI, you can enable things like personalized tutors and grading systems, where you can get more personalized feedback.
It’s very important to realize that technology is just a tool. You still need a sound educational pedagogy within which to apply the technology. People go wrong in that there are lots of AI and other edtech tools, but they actually don’t have a sound educational pedagogy. You must have an educational philosophy on which you then layer the technology to deliver those outcomes.
One of the things we believe—and research demonstrates—is that to effectively learn a skill, only 10 percent can be learned in the classroom; 20 percent comes from peers, mentors, and coaches—what they call developmental relationships—and 70 percent comes from doing. You must do projects, and you learn by applying the skill.
This is why we put a lot of projects into our curriculum. You’re learning how to build things, you’re doing things in the community, and you’re actually applying the knowledge. That part is outside of tech, but you’re engaged with your peers, and you’re learning from each other. That’s all part of our philosophy.
Can you give a couple of examples of the types of problems that leaders who have been through your academy have solved?
Sand Technologies is basically a problem-solving factory. We are leveraging some of the talent. Today, we are probably the largest trainer of software engineers and data scientists in the world. We are training about 300,000 people across Africa right now. We’ve got 35 campuses. For context, the US awards 75,000 computer science degrees a year from 4,000 colleges and universities. This year alone, we as a single institution have had 100,000 students graduate. We have a large pool of talent, and we are harnessing some of it at Sand Technologies to solve big problems.
For example, our AI systems are managing the water supply for the city of London. We are helping more than 16 million homes. We’re helping to predict when a pipe is going to burst. We’re preventing pollution from reaching oceans and rivers. We’ve created a digital twin of the entire water system with 20,000 sensors that tell us a lot. We can simulate investment decisions before decisions have to be made. We’re reducing carbon emissions from waste treatment plants to other treatment plants. This is having a real impact on the lives of London’s residents.
We’ve installed sensors in the rivers in the UK that feed London, and we’re tracking nitrates, phosphates, turbidity, and plant and animal life. A resident can enter their home address and determine which river supplies their drinking water and the quality of that water. This is the application of data and AI that enables us to solve real problems.
In the telecommunications space, the president of a country wanted to figure out how to increase access to its citizens. They covered only about 50 percent of the country, and the local cell phone companies wanted to place towers. But the companies had a 50 percent error rate in terms of placement of these towers. We showed that the towers they planned to install would provide only 75 percent coverage. We used AI to optimally place these towers to achieve 96 percent coverage without spending more money. That saved hundreds of millions of dollars that could then be put toward more productive uses in the country.
Our AI systems can help with these and many other real problems. I’m not talking about things that are to come. These are actual projects that we have developed using these methodologies, which Sand Technologies is delivering to real cities, real countries, and real companies around the world.
What happens next? Where do you go from here?
We plan to work with Sand Technologies to keep doing hard things and solving big problems. Today we’re in water and some utilities, but we’re going to expand into other utilities: electricity, gas, renewables, and so forth.
How do we help with energy transition more broadly? Water is a huge problem, and the work we’ve done with the city of London and with four or five other utilities in the UK is transferable. When we come to the US, we realize that cities have completely analog systems. There’s a lot of old infrastructure in the US that needs to be digitized to enable predictive maintenance, build digital twins, and optimize operations. There’s a massive opportunity there. We want to expand into the US to bring many of the solutions that we’ve been doing to continue to grow in the whole utility space. Because this really affects human lives.
We will continue growing in the healthcare space. We will also continue to work in telecommunications globally. We’re entering new domains as well, including supply chain and logistics, transportation, and oil and gas. These are all asset-heavy industries, old industries where billions of dollars are being deployed.
We’re continuing to enter new domains in areas where we have expertise. There’s a lot of opportunity. We want to continue developing this talent in those who understand the problems of society, so that they’re driven by the problems they want to solve first, not by the technology for technology’s sake. With that army of problem-solvers that we deploy through Sand Technologies, we want to really help change the world.
You’ve talked about technologies, education, and transforming the world. Africa is also very close to your heart. Tell us about your biggest dreams for Africa.
My biggest dream for Africa is that it becomes the world’s center of innovation in this century. I think it absolutely has the potential to do that. Why?
First, we have the world’s greatest untapped source of talent. The average age of an African is 19 at a time when the rest of the world is aging. Young people tend to be more innovative. Historically, this talent hasn’t been tapped because educating them has been expensive. Thanks to technology, you can do it at a radically low cost, and we can do it at the highest levels in the world.
Phenomenal innovation is emerging from Africa. Last year, we incubated about 400 tech start-ups. This year, we’ve done about 2,000, and they’re coming up with disruptive innovations. I see Africa as a source of innovation. The mistake many people make is treating Africa as a source of demand rather than a source of supply.
When people look at Africa, they see it accounts for only 3 percent of the world’s GDP and think it’s not relevant to them. But Africa will represent 40 percent of the world’s population by the end of the century. It’s a place where a lot of innovation can come from. So think of it as a source of talent. Considering what has happened in India in the past 40 years, I see the same thing happening in Africa.
My hope for Africa is that we can use technology to redefine the goal of development. Today, when you read a lot of the literature about development, it’s quite hopeless. They say Africa’s not going anywhere, that it’s not developing, because the gap between Africa’s GDP per capita and the West’s has widened over the past 30 years. It hasn’t shrunk. I think that’s because they’re measuring the wrong thing.
Another way to achieve the same standard of living is to ask: How do I reduce the cost of healthcare, education, and housing to such radically low levels that they fit within my existing GDP per capita? Then I can have a high standard of living at my existing cost.
The chance that we have in Africa is to radically reduce the cost of getting the same standard of living, such that it fits within our GDP, so we don’t have to wait 100 years before Africa’s GDP per capita catches up to the rest of the world. That’s the journey and the sort of revolution that I hope to help capitalize on with some of the initiatives that we’re doing in Africa.
You’ve been an incredible entrepreneur, and you’ve been on this journey. What have you learned about leadership? What lessons would you share?
One thing I’ve learned is that if you want something to get big, you have to give it away. It means enrolling others in your vision and mission, empowering other people, enabling them to do their work, and getting out of their way. Then you harness the energy of many, many brains that are more talented and energetic than you are. Then you can scale and do things that are much bigger, and on a much larger scale, than you ever could have imagined.
I’ve learned the importance of building great teams. I spend half of my time hiring. I don’t delegate that to others. It’s the single most important thing that I do. Even though we’re at almost 1,000 employees across the group, every manager has to write a motivation pack to me before they hire someone. I approve most of them, but the symbolism of explaining to the CEO why you need to hire this person makes our managers think twice before hiring someone, and it makes them go through a much more rigorous hiring process.
I’ve also learned about the centrality of the customer. Most organizations have the CEO at the top, then senior vice presidents, managers, and the team. I flipped my organizational chart, putting customers at the top. The teams on the front line, who interact with customers, make the most decisions. They must be empowered to decide. Under them are the senior managers and the managers. The CEO is at the bottom. This has completely changed the culture in the organization to be much more outwardly focused and customer-centric, and removes a lot of the politics.
Finally, I’ve learned about the importance of clear communication. I send a weekly CEO update to the entire company. It includes what has happened since the previous week, our key metrics, examples of company values that I saw employees exhibiting, and a reminder of where we’re going and why. When I write on LinkedIn, I’m writing mostly for my staff. When they see me on Instagram, I’m demonstrating what matters. They see me meeting our customers, and I’m reflecting on new technologies and the problems we’re solving. When I do that, it makes my job as a leader very easy, because people can run in the direction that I hope they will, and very few problems bubble up to the top.
These are just some of the lessons I’ve learned on this journey.
Final thoughts
Fred Swaniker’s insights are a powerful reminder that the future of leadership is about more than just guiding a company; it’s about using technology, innovation, and human-centered thinking to solve the world’s most pressing problems. As we move forward, let’s take these lessons to heart and challenge ourselves to think bigger, empower our teams, and create solutions that benefit not just our organizations but the world at large.
At The Exchange, we are committed to fostering conversations that inspire, challenge, and engage. Fred’s vision for Africa and his approach to leadership provide a blueprint for the future—one where technology and human resilience come together to drive transformative change. Let’s embrace this future and lead with purpose.
Fred Swaniker is the founder and CEO of Sand Technologies and founder of the African Leadership Group. Fred serves on the Board of Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and Graca Machel Trust. He is a member of the Creating Shared Value Council at Nestlé and is chair of the Rwanda Convention Bureau.
Fred has been recognized with the following Honors and Awards: 100 Most Influential People in the World (issued by TIME, January 2019), Top 10 Young Power Men in Africa (issued by Forbes, January 2011), President’s Forum for Young African Leaders (issued by US President Barack Obama, January 2010), TED Fellow (issued by TED, January 2009), 15 Best Emerging Entrepreneurs in the World (issued by Echoing Green, January 2006), Arjay Miller Scholar (issued by Stanford Graduate School of Business, January 2004; awarded to graduates in the top 10 percent of their class), Global Leadership Network (issued by Aspen Institute) and Young Global Leader (issued by World Economic Forum).
Asutosh Padhi is a senior partner and global leader, Firm Strategy, responsible for driving the strategic vision, accelerating the firm’s pace of innovation, and strengthening the partnership model for the next century. He was previously the North America managing partner, leading the firm across the United States and Canada, and was a member of the Shareholders Council, the firm’s equivalent of a board of directors.
He is also coauthor of The Titanium Economy, a book that explores the industrial tech sector and the bright future that it can help create. Comments and opinions expressed by interviewees are their own and do not represent or reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of McKinsey & Company or have its endorsement.
This interview was recorded on October 4, 2024.
This piece originally posted November 21, 2024, on LinkedIn.com as part of Asutosh Padhi’s interview series, The Exchange.