Professor Willem Fourie. Photo: Karolina Komendera

Professor Willem Fourie doesn’t have a background in technology. He has a doctorate in social ethics, first teaching religious ethics, before moving into the business faculty at the University of Pretoria. “I was deeply involved in matters related to development effectiveness,” he says.

When teaching ethics, Fourie became an advisor to the African Union, taking part in conversations about the continent’s development that preceded the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “At that point, they were called the Post 2015 Development Agenda and I knew, as someone who worked at a university, that we had a lot of great research that could actually help achieve these ambitious goals,” he says.