Welcome to Issue #14 of TAIS, where every Friday we spotlight visionary changemakers reshaping Africa’s tech, data, and AI landscape, one breakthrough at a time.
In today's issue, we feature Jason Bygate, a South African digital inclusion specialist and development advisor whose work spans over two decades at the intersection of technology, finance, and social impact across Africa.
Jason Bygate| Director, Capacitate Social Solutions
Currently serving as Technical and Partner Lead for the Community Digital Empowerment Initiative and Director of Innovation and Digital Transformation at Capacitate Social Solutions, Jason has dedicated his career to leveraging ICT4D, ESG principles, and financial inclusion strategies to drive transformative change in some of the continent's most challenging contexts. His approach, rooted in community-centred implementation and the belief that technology must serve equitable distribution of opportunity, positions him uniquely to speak on Africa's role in shaping global digital futures.
THE MAKING OF A SYSTEMS THINKER
Q: You and I first connected through a panel on AI in climate-focused evaluations. For readers who weren’t there, can you briefly walk us through your journey into this intersection of tech, community, and impact?
A: My journey into this weird and wonderful blend of technology, community, and impact has been quite an adventure, full of twists, turns, and plenty of lessons learned along the way. It kicked off at university, where I dove headfirst into the social sciences, interested in the human psyche and how social structures function and change. But as soon as I graduated, I felt the entrepreneurial itch and launched my first IT company with my brother. That experience was my first deep dive into using tech to tackle real-world problems.
From there, my career took me through several different industries. I spent time in logistics, learning how to streamline systems and boost efficiency, and then moved into health tech, which opened my eyes to how technology can dramatically improve people's lives. It was a game-changer and sparked my lasting commitment to Tech4Good initiatives.
For the past 15 years, I've been fully immersed in the impact space as a social entrepreneur focused on the green and social economy. My work revolves around three main areas: building Tech4Good solutions, digital platforms designed specifically to drive sustainability, inclusion, and justice; leveraging data to improve impact through Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), I am a big believer in creating a culture of data-led decision making; and providing strategic advice and advocacy to organizations across Africa, helping them harness tech effectively for greater social and environmental change.
Q: You’ve spent years designing human-centred digital interventions. What early projects shaped your thinking around ethical innovation and inclusive technology in underserved communities?
A:Early in my career, projects around mobile technology for M&E, field-based data collection and community health significantly shaped my perspective. These experiences taught me the crucial importance of deeply understanding context and prioritizing ease of use. I learned that technology must clearly demonstrate its usefulness from the community's perspective to achieve genuine adoption and lasting impact.
Interestingly, the more I've journeyed through my career as a social technologist, the clearer it has become that a human-centred approach isn't just beneficial, it's absolutely essential. Data and technology can profoundly change lives, but only when they're genuinely aligned with the real needs of communities and when those communities feel true ownership and agency over the solutions we create. With my team, we consistently aim for a systemic, participatory approach that prioritizes cooperation and community involvement.
Q: What role does mentorship or peer learning play in your work? Are there individuals or networks that have helped shape your thinking or opened doors along the way?
A:Hmm, that's a difficult one. The life of a social entrepreneur can be a lonely one, it’s been quite a long road to build up support structures and peer networks. My master’s dissertation with the Centre for Social Development in Africa definitely helped shape my thinking around digital inclusion. It gave me a chance to work closely with NGO partners and funding organizations, and that hands-on engagement allowed me to build relationships that went beyond just individual projects. That’s where I started to find people who shared a similar perspective and a real focus on impact.
Mentorship and peer learning have played a big role, even if sometimes in more informal ways. I’ve learned so much from peers in the field people who are also trying to make tech work in complex, real-world settings. Having a few trusted people to bounce ideas off or unpack a challenge with has been invaluable. And networks like the ones I’ve built through my work with UNICEF, YDColab, FirstRand and grassroots partners have opened doors and expanded my thinking in ways I couldn’t have predicted. It’s these connections, where there’s shared purpose, vulnerability, and a willingness to learn that really sustain me and keep the work grounded.
Images from the Girls Education Innovation Challenge – a programme designed and implemented for UNICEF in Sierra Leone, applying the Capacitate Triple A Approach to digital inclusion
Editorial Commentary
Jason's career path highlights an important aspect of how we prepare people to tackle complex social problems. His movement through logistics, health technology, and impact work created a unique hybrid expertise that no single degree programme teaches. He's become what we might call a "social technologist", someone who can translate between communities, institutions, and technology.
This cross-sector experience explains why his approach works where others fail. The social impact world is littered with well-intentioned technology projects that miss the mark. Jason's method of starting with community needs rather than technical capabilities seems straightforward, but it's surprisingly uncommon. Most tech-for-good initiatives still follow the Silicon Valley playbook: build first, find users later.
Yet this expertise comes with its challenges. The isolation Jason describes points to a structural gap in the impact ecosystem. Social technologists don't fit neatly into existing categories; they're not traditional nonprofit leaders, pure tech entrepreneurs, or policy specialists. This makes them harder to fund and support, but it also keeps them from being easily captured by institutional agendas.
Instead of waiting for formal support structures, Jason has created his own. The partnerships he mentions, UNICEF, YDColab, and FirstRand, represent ecosystem building in the absence of traditional venture infrastructure. These are the support network that enables continued work. Rather than wait for an innovation ecosystem to emerge, he stitched together relationships across academic, NGO, and corporate sectors.
Jason's pragmatic approach to community ownership demonstrates hard-won wisdom about what makes technology projects succeed. He's mastered the sophisticated skill of knowing when communities need active technical collaboration and when they need space to lead independently. This represents one of social technology's most nuanced abilities: reading the dynamics of genuine partnership and adapting accordingly. Jason's years of experience show that successful community ownership isn't about technologists stepping aside entirely, but about becoming responsive partners who can shift between hands-on collaboration and supportive presence as communities direct. His work across diverse contexts reveals that this adaptive partnership model scales effectively when practitioners develop the judgment to calibrate their involvement to community needs and preferences.
His experience suggests that the future of effective social technology might depend less on better apps and more on better translators, people who understand both what technology can do and what communities actually need.
BUILDING ON DIGITAL FLUENCY
Q: You’re now launching the Community Digital Empowerment Initiative, which empowers youth as digital enablers in their communities. What sparked this initiative, and what impact are you hoping it will drive?
A: Launching the CDE Initiative truly captures the stubborn determination or perhaps the relentless optimism that defines social entrepreneurship. The idea for CDE took root over a decade ago when I was involved in a school nutrition program that used mobile technology for data collection and monitoring. I saw an opportunity to expand the role of field monitors into trusted digital activators within their communities. We initially secured significant funding to launch with 2,000 youth, but our primary partner’s commercial funder struggled to grasp the concept's long-term value and sustainability, ultimately causing the initiative to stall (yes they sent the money back).
However, I couldn't let go of the vision. About 3 years ago, I managed to raise some funding from UNICEF and PwC to develop the YoMobi.org platform, a comprehensive digital toolkit designed specifically for youth organizations. It includes micro-learning modules, a youth service directory, an opportunities marketplace, moderated chat, and importantly, digital task management coupled with a digital wallet.
YoMobi – Youth Platform used for the CDE initiative
Partnering with Edunova, who shared our vision of empowering youth as digital enablers in their communities, we found common ground to launch the CDE initiative. Our ambitious goal is to create a nationwide network of over 25,000 digitally empowered youth. These young digital entrepreneurs are trained, equipped with technology, and centrally supported to succeed as micro-franchisees. They'll perform digital tasks such as data collection, surveys, digital marketing, lead generation, and community activations. Through this approach, we hope that they not only drive tech adoption and digital inclusion in their communities but also build viable pathways to economic independence.
Q: Digital inclusion is often treated as a checkbox. What do you believe is still misunderstood about digital empowerment and what does meaningful inclusion actually look like in practice?
A: Digital inclusion is deeply misunderstood, often treated as being one dimensional - about access to the technology - devices and connectivity. But that’s merely the starting point. True digital empowerment goes much further. It's about building genuine capability, equipping people with the skills to actively use technology, not just passively consuming social media content or becoming the product themselves. Beyond skills, meaningful inclusion means creating real opportunities for people to transform their digital access and abilities into tangible value, economically, socially, and culturally. Finally, it requires ensuring representation and diversity in this rapidly evolving digital space, preserving cultural identity rather than allowing it to be diluted or overshadowed in the digital realm. Understanding this is what informs our approach to supporting digital inclusion and digital transformation in civil society.
Q: You’ve spoken about the need for tech to be contextually grounded. In your leadership journey, how have you ensured the communities you work with remain at the centre of design and strategy?
A: The human-centred approach I mentioned has also been a guiding principle in my own leadership journey. I’ve always believed that communities should be at the centre of everything we design and build. To make that happen, we co-create from day one, whether we’re developing a new digital platform or shaping an M&E strategy. We sit with people, listen closely, and make sure their insights shape the direction of the work. It’s not just about gathering input, it’s about shifting power, so the community isn’t just a beneficiary, but a co-architect. And we carry that thinking through into how we measure success, too. Using our Systemic Intervention Mapping approach, we work with communities and stakeholders to build a shared understanding of what success actually looks like in their context. That shared vision then informs the indicators we track and the data we collect, keeping it grounded, relevant, and ultimately useful for the people it’s meant to serve.
Editorial Commentary
Jason's decade-long persistence with the CDE initiative captures something essential about social entrepreneurship: the ideas that survive multiple rejections often turn out to be the ones that matter most. His story of a funder sending money back because they "couldn't grasp the long-term value" will resonate with anyone who's tried to pitch transformational change to traditional institutions.
The CDE initiative also reveals one of the most fascinating dynamics in scaling social innovation. Jason's approach is deeply rooted in co-creation and community-centred design, principles that typically work best through close, ongoing relationships and intensive collaboration. At the same time, the CDE initiative's ambitious vision to reach 25,000 youth across diverse communities represents the kind of scale that could create genuine systems-level change. This is one of the central puzzles that thoughtful social innovators must solve: how do we maintain deeply relational approaches while achieving meaningful scale?
Traditional scaling often involves standardization and efficiency gains that can strip away the very qualities that made the original intervention effective. The most impactful community-centred work tends to be highly contextual, responsive to local needs, and built on trust developed over time. Jason's micro-franchise model offers a thoughtful response to this challenge. By positioning young people as entrepreneurs rather than employees, he's creating economic pathways that could be genuinely transformative while potentially preserving the relational foundation that makes the work effective. The approach acknowledges that sustainable empowerment needs sustainable income, a lesson many development programs learn too late.
Moreover, what makes the CDE initiative particularly smart is how it works with existing behavior rather than against it. Young people are already the most digitally connected population; they're online, they're engaged, they understand the tools. This digital nativity represents an enormous untapped resource that most development programmes overlook or undervalue.
Traditional skills training often starts from a deficit mindset, focusing on what young people lack rather than what they already bring to the table. Jason's approach flips this entirely. Rather than asking them to learn something entirely new or abandon their digital habits, he redirects the digital fluency they already possess toward community benefit and economic opportunity.
This recognition is crucial because it acknowledges that young people aren't passive recipients of digital empowerment; they're already digitally empowered in many ways. They navigate social media, understand online communication, and intuitively grasp how digital platforms work. The challenge is helping them channel that existing expertise into economically productive and socially beneficial activities. So his approach respects young people's agency in a way that traditional training programmes often don't. Instead of treating their digital engagement as frivolous or problematic, Jason's model recognizes it as a foundation to build upon. This subtle shift in perspective from seeing digital engagement as a distraction to seeing it as an asset could make the difference between programmes that young people tolerate and programmes they genuinely embrace.
The range of tasks: data collection, surveys, digital marketing, etc, represents a recalibration of attention rather than a completely new skill set. Instead of scrolling endlessly or consuming content passively, young people can channel their digital engagement into work that serves their communities while building their economic independence. These tasks might seem routine on the surface, but they represent how young people are becoming the bridge between their communities and the digital economy. This positioning could be transformative, though whether this model can maintain its community-centred ethos at scale will be fascinating to watch.
These are the fundamental tensions that social innovators like Jason face when trying to scale community-centred work. Whether the CDE initiative can resolve them may well determine if social technology can finally bridge grassroots impact with systems-level change.
AI AS A CONTRADICTORY LIBERATION TOOL
Q: How do you see AI being practically and ethically applied in climate justice and climate-related M&E? What excites you most, and what concerns you?
A: I'm genuinely excited about how AI can practically support climate justice and improve climate-related M&E, AI gives us the tools to handle vast amounts of climate data, helping us predict changes more accurately, track issues in real-time, and respond faster. For communities most impacted by climate change, AI can level the playing field by giving them easy access to crucial information, helping them advocate for themselves and actively participate in climate solutions. From an ethical standpoint, AI has the potential to make climate action more transparent and fair, reducing biases in how decisions and resources are managed. By relying on clear, data-driven insights, we can minimize human biases and ensure efforts are genuinely inclusive and equitable.
But it’s not all good news, there are some real concerns we need to face. Training and operating powerful AI systems, especially large language models (LLMs), requires huge amounts of energy, which can ironically contribute to the climate issues we're trying to address. There are also significant social justice concerns. Issues around data privacy, representation, and potential biases in the datasets used to train AI models could unintentionally worsen existing inequalities.
Finding the right balance is critical. We need to harness AI's incredible potential while actively addressing its environmental footprint and ensuring we don’t unintentionally create new problems. That makes working in this space both exciting and a bit frightening.
Q: Much of the M&E space remains extractive in its approach to data. How are you using technology to disrupt that model and make data work for communities, not just institutions?
A: That's a great point, and it's exactly what we're trying to change. Traditionally data gets taken from communities, but they rarely see the benefits. We're using technology to flip that around, making data genuinely work for the communities themselves. Our approach is deeply participatory. POPIA and GDPR compliance is of course the foundation for any data undertaking with participants in an M&E process but we also try to involve community members right from the start, ensuring they're part of deciding what data gets collected, how it gets used, and who has access to it. By doing this, we empower communities to own the process, which makes the data much more relevant and impactful for them. We also prioritize open data access and real-time feedback loops. This means participants can easily see and understand the data they're contributing, making sure they get direct value from their involvement. It's about shifting the power balance, giving communities real agency, and ensuring the data genuinely helps improve their lives, not just serving reporting demands.
Editorial Commentary
Jason's approach to climate AI cuts straight to the fundamental problem that entails communities generating the data, but institutions controlling the insights. His solution is deceptively simple: flip the power structure so communities own their data from collection to action. The implementation details reveal how radical this shift is. While most climate monitoring extracts information from communities to feed institutional reports, Jason's team builds systems where participants see their data in real-time and decide how it gets used. This represents a completely different business model for climate information, one that serves data generators rather than data consumers.
His candid admission about AI's carbon footprint also reveals the depth of his practical experience. Training large language models consumes massive energy, creating an uncomfortable irony for climate work. That Jason acknowledges this tension suggests he's running these calculations rather than assuming AI is automatically beneficial for environmental causes.
The technical complexity becomes apparent when considering his regulatory environment. Jason operates across multiple frameworks (South Africa's strict POPIA laws alongside European GDPR standards) while building participatory systems that exceed legal minimums. Rather than treating privacy protection as a constraint, he uses it as a foundation for community empowerment.
This philosophical approach extends to his broader critique of traditional M&E practices. When Jason says communities "rarely see the benefits" of the data they provide, he's describing a multi-billion-dollar M&E sector that generates reports for donors rather than tools for communities. His alternative, real-time feedback loops that serve community decision-making, represents a fundamental reengineering of how climate information flows.
The temporal dimension makes this reengineering even more crucial as communities need climate data on seasonal cycles for planting and adaptation decisions, while academic research operates on multi-year publication timelines. Jason's systems bridge this gap by prioritizing community timescales over institutional reporting schedules.
The institutional redesign is what’s truly innovative here. Jason has identified that the bottleneck in climate adaptation is power dynamics: who gets to ask questions, interpret answers, and act on results. Can this community-centred approach scale without losing its participatory core? How Jason navigates this challenge could provide a roadmap for other community-centred innovations seeking sustainable growth.
HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, AND WARMWARE
Q: How do you navigate the tension between grassroots impact and top-down policy in your work? What lessons have you learned about making systems-level change without losing touch with local realities?
A: Navigating this tension is definitely a balancing act. In my experience, it's essential to build bridges between these two perspectives rather than treating them as opposites. One of the key lessons I've learned is the importance of consistently grounding systems-level strategies in local realities. Without that, even the best-intentioned policies can lose touch and become ineffective.
At Capacitate, we use something called Systemic Intervention Mapping, a systemic approach to M&E that helps us manage this tension effectively. This approach brings together diverse stakeholders, from grassroots community members to policymakers, to create a shared vision of success. By doing this collectively, we can define relevant indicators and data collection priorities that truly reflect local needs and systemic goals simultaneously. Ultimately, maintaining open and ongoing dialogue between different levels of stakeholders ensures that our solutions remain practical, impactful, and responsive to real-world conditions. It's about ensuring everyone is aligned and feels ownership, making systemic change not just possible, but genuinely effective.
Q: You’ve worked with many stakeholders, governments, NGOs, tech developers. What’s one mindset shift you think institutions must adopt to truly serve underrepresented communities in the digital age?
A: I think that institutions really need to embrace genuinely adopting a human-centred approach. It's not just about ticking boxes or providing technology. Instead, it means truly understanding the complex, multi-dimensional nature of the digital divide, recognizing it's not only about individuals lacking access but also about organizations needing the right capabilities and resources.
Too often, the focus is on hardware, software, and connectivity, the technical layers. But what’s frequently overlooked is the "warmware" layer: the people. Their motivations, skills, capacity, and lived experiences are what ultimately determine whether a digital solution actually works. Institutions need to invest just as much into supporting and empowering people as they do in rolling out tech infrastructure. They must shift their perspective to deeply engage with communities, listening to their real needs, priorities, and daily challenges. Technology should always be seen as an enabler, not the end goal itself. Only by genuinely putting people first and fully grasping the layered realities at both individual and organizational levels can institutions effectively serve and empower underrepresented communities in this digital age.
Editorial commentary
The term "warmware" cuts through years of development jargon to identify something concrete. Institutions pour resources into hardware, software, and connectivity while systematically underinvesting in the human systems that determine whether technology works. It's a precise diagnosis of why digital initiatives fail despite having all the technical pieces in place.
The insight becomes even sharper when Jason notes that organizations, not just individuals, suffer from capability gaps. A community health clinic might have tablets and internet but lack staff training, data processes, or leadership buy-in to use them effectively. This organizational dimension of digital divides gets overlooked because it's messier and more complex than simply counting devices or measuring connectivity speeds.
Jason's Systemic Intervention Mapping approach enables diverse stakeholders to collectively define success before building systems. His methodology acknowledges the real challenge of power imbalances when community organizations sit with government officials and donors, but Jason has developed practical techniques for ensuring community voices aren't overshadowed. His decade of experience shows that a truly collective definition is difficult but achievable when facilitated skillfully.
This nuanced understanding extends to Jason's broader approach. He insists on putting people first while operating within institutional frameworks fundamentally designed around efficiency and scale. Rather than simply fighting against institutional logic, Jason has learned to work within these constraints while advocating for human capacity and genuine local ownership. His success comes from demonstrating that warmware investments ultimately serve institutional goals; they make technology deployments more effective and sustainable.
The ongoing challenge is whether participatory methods can consistently compete with top-down implementation when institutions face mounting pressure for rapid results. Jason's track record suggests they can, but it requires practitioners who understand both community needs and institutional realities. His warmware insight identifies a real problem and offers workable solutions, though scaling this approach across different contexts and institutional cultures remains an evolving challenge.
THE INNOVATION BORN FROM NECESSITY
Q: How do you see Africa contributing to global conversations around AI, digital transformation, and community tech? And what does the rest of the world still need to learn from Africa?
A: I think it’s time the rest of the world started paying closer attention. There’s so much happening here, so much diversity, innovation, and resilience and a lot less of the rigid structure and formality you see in other parts of the world. That might seem chaotic to some, but it’s actually where some of the most creative and context-aware solutions are being born.
We’re navigating complex realities with limited resources, which forces us to innovate differently, faster, leaner, and closer to the ground. Africa has a lot to offer in terms of rethinking tech’s role in society, not just as something shiny and new, but as something that has to work for people in real life. But let’s be honest, we also have some catching up to do. There’s a serious digital debt that needs to be addressed. If we don’t close that gap, we risk being left out of critical conversations, decisions, and systems that are shaping the future. So inclusion isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s essential. Africa doesn’t just need a seat at the table. We need to be helping set the table.
Q: Looking ahead, what’s one gap or overlooked opportunity in the digital empowerment or AI-for-development space that you believe we should be paying more attention to and why?
A: I think that one of the biggest gaps we’re not talking enough about is the human side of digital empowerment and AI-for-development. Everyone’s chasing the next big tech breakthrough, but not enough people are asking: who is this for, and how does it actually improve someone’s life? We need to stop designing tech in labs and boardrooms and start designing it with the people who will use it, in the places they live and work. That’s where the real opportunity lies. And let’s not forget, Africa has the youngest population in the world. That’s not just a statistic; it’s a massive, untapped force of creativity, energy, and possibility. If we invest in human-centred design, digital literacy, and community-rooted innovation, we’re not just closing gaps, we’re unlocking a demographic dividend that could drive inclusive growth for decades. But that won’t happen by accident. It has to be intentional. We have to stop thinking of people as users and start seeing them as co-creators of the digital future.
Editorial Commentary
When Jason describes Africa's "less rigid structure and formality" as creative fuel rather than dysfunction, he's challenging a persistent bias in how global tech views the continent. What outsiders often label as "chaotic" is actually adaptive flexibility, the ability to innovate around constraints that would paralyze more structured systems. This reframing has profound implications for how international partners approach collaboration. Jason's emphasis on "context-aware solutions" suggests that Africa's real contribution lies not in copying Silicon Valley models, but in demonstrating entirely different approaches to technological problem-solving.
Yet Jason doesn't romanticize Africa's position in the global digital landscape. His honest acknowledgment of the continent's "digital debt" cuts through typical conference rhetoric about leapfrogging. This debt is about systematic exclusion from the foundational decisions shaping our digital future. Every algorithm trained without contextualized African data, every standard set without African input, deepens this exclusion. For policymakers and development organizations, this should trigger urgent questions about the difference between authority and participation versus mere representation. Having Africans use technology isn't the same as having Africans shape it.
This distinction leads to perhaps the most important insight in Jason's perspective. His emphasis on moving "from users to co-creators." This is a perspective that has been echoed consistently by past TAIS guests. What's emerging is an established consensus among many African tech leaders that this represents more than feel-good language; it's a fundamental critique of how AI-for-development typically operates. The implications of this critique are therefore significant. Most digital empowerment initiatives still follow colonial-era patterns of external design and local implementation. This approach, Jason argues, wastes Africa's greatest asset, its young, creative population, while producing solutions that don't improve lives on the ground.
What's striking about Jason's analysis is how he balances realism with ambition. He neither dismisses Africa's challenges nor oversells its capabilities. This measured perspective suggests a maturity in African tech leadership that global partners need to recognize and engage with seriously.
The real test, I argue, will be whether international stakeholders can evolve beyond seeing Africa as either a market to capture or a problem to solve, toward genuine partnership in shaping digital futures.
Some screens from the AI work in the Youth sector…Zola the YubuntuBot:
Also, some of the other platform cooperatives:
YoAgri – Agripreneur Support platform
CONCLUSION
My takeaway from this conversation is clear. What Jason offers the broader tech ecosystem is practical proof that communities can be co-creators rather than just users. His work matters because it's happening now, with measurable results, in contexts where failure has lasting consequences. The challenge to all social innovators is whether they'll study Jason’s methods before building their next "solution" for communities. This means sitting in community meetings before writing code, letting local priorities shape technical specifications, and building systems where communities control their own data and decisions.
This newsletter is independently researched, community-rooted, and crafted with care. Its mission is to break down walls of complexity and exclusion in tech, AI, and data to build bridges that amplify African innovation for global audiences.
It highlights how these solutions serve the communities where they're developed, while offering insights for innovators around the world.
If this mission resonates with you, here are ways to help sustain this work:
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