Dr Sibongiseni Tunzelana Thotsejane is using tech to create African solutions for not only for Africa, but for the world.  She is a chief information officer, founder, digital innovator and big data analytics expert at FlavaLite Innovations.

We understand the challenges of inequality, of high unemployment rates and poverty, so therefore the solution will be Afrocentric, because we understand the context — we don’t have to contextualise further. We come from the context and we are the context.

Thotsejane completed her PhD in information systems at the University of Cape Town, in collaboration with Ryerson University in Canada. She is completing her doctorate in business administration, majoring in applied fourth industrial revolution (4IR), at the University of Bath in the UK.

She has over 20 years’ experience in the ICT and telecommunications sectors and is a commissioner in the South African presidential commission on the 4IR. She is also an adjunct senior lecturer at UCT, and she supervises DBA and PhD candidates in computing systems and information systems.

Her company, FlavaLite Innovations, works in the aerospace, maritime and defence sectors introducing them to IT strategy, big data analytics, application development, cyber security, Internet of Things, 4IR and AI. Here her work is driven by love and compassion. “We always start from the heart and bring in the human element. Being involved in such a hard tech space, the human element is in the heart of what we bring. We are huggers, which is very rare for techies,” she says.

Thotsejane also mentors more than 20 entrepreneurs, postgraduate candidates and musicians. While first mentoring young people from townships and rural areas, she came across a number of hip-hop artists who wanted to make music is seSotho and isisXhosa. She wanted to understand their work, which led to her recording her first single, and now she is working on her first mixed tape with her men. “I started recording a single so I could be empathic. It is not always easy to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. So I ended up being a hip-hop DJ!”

—Rumana Akoob