Focusing on human metrics will close the digital divide.

By Claudio Coelho, Founder and CEO at Backspace Technologies

Here’s the truth about how connectivity is seen broadly. Walk into any boardroom and you will hear comforting numbers. 99.9% uptime and megabits per second north of 100. C-suites might talk about ironclad SLAs.

On paper this all looks flawless. But consider this: in the real world those numbers mean nothing to a child in an informal settlement who has no access to a fibre line or to a factory worker whose family is stuck on expensive cellular data that runs out before the month does.

If we are honest, the South African connectivity industry has spent years fighting for the same slice of the affluent pie while the majority of the country, people who genuinely need the opportunities that being connected enables, remain priced out, or to put it more bluntly, locked out. We would do well to reframe our focus, to cast our gaze if only for a moment, away from those who have connectivity towards those who have very little or no affordable connectivity at all. It’s about appreciating the gap between KPIs and lived reality.

Are we happy with the status quo?

An obsession with technical metrics is mirrored inside many companies too. Skills shortages – especially in the IT industry – have turned hiring into a desperate scramble. Companies poach skilled technicians from one another at premium rates, only to watch in horror when culture dissipates as new technicians cannot work in teams, cannot adapt to challenging conditions in the lower end of the market, or – plainly put – arrive with the wrong attitude.

The status quo presents the same problem at both ends of the value chain. We have a sector that measures the wrong things. For customers, it is measuring uptime percentages as cold data points that ignore whether children can actually access online learning. For talent within businesses, we gravitate towards CVs that show an impressive track record but show nothing about whether someone shows up with grit when theft, load shedding or economic shocks hit.

Breaking out of this status quo isn’t idealistic. On the contrary, this is precisely how Backspace navigated from humble beginnings. We have imperfect conditions in South Africa, everyone knows this. The pandemic magnified this. The lesson is that technical excellence without human resilience is self-defeating.

A human-centred alternative

A handy, and proven way towards growth and success is to focus on human metrics. Redefine success around “human uptime”, not just whether the network is up, but whether it is changing lives. What does this mean? It means that connectivity is reaching informal settlements and other poorer, working communities at prices they can actually afford.

This purpose-led culture is achieved by hiring for attitude first, and then deeply investing in the people who have it. You simply cannot execute on purpose if you hire technically brilliant but toxic team members. This same philosophy scales outward: give communities the tools and incentives to connect themselves. They will.

Turning a human-centric approach into opportunity

Once you have the right approach to human metrics, both internally and externally, it is far easier to chase opportunity in the face of immense challenges. Take Backspace’s reverse billing model for example, which turns data into something akin to being “toll-free”. Any app, website or payment device can be accessed at no cost to the end user; the supplier of the content or service is back-billed. APN technology locks the device so the SIM cannot be removed or misused, while still allowing the machine to reach its required applications for free. Human metrics: Are people being connected and enabled?

Internally, the same human-centric logic applies. You want creativity and an opportunity mindset to drive innovation. To foster this, it is useful bringing in external coaches with new and different energy, investing in internal training programmes and adopting an open-door policy so that staff members feel their voice can be heard. This kind of culture leads to an environment with high tenure, and one where innovation flows.

Again, this is not idealistic, it’s been learnt through practice. During the pandemic when everyone was panicking, we went from humble voice-only beginnings to R18-million monthly revenue generated from shipping SIM phones to the informal sector. Without any doubt, focusing on human metrics enables businesses to turn imperfect conditions into opportunity.

The lesson is simple. South Africa’s connectivity future depends on people, not just percentages. Businesses would do well to look at their own metrics. If the definition of uptime stops at network availability, you’re missing out on so much more.

If we’re honest. We don’t need more 99.9% uptime headlines. We need human uptime. The country craves connectivity that actually reaches the people who need it most, delivered by teams who believe making a real difference matters more than any single skill. Organisations that make this shift will be the ones who finally close the digital divide, not just talk about it.

By Professor Owen Skae, Director: Rhodes Business School

There are two young fish swimming along when they meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and asks, “Good morning. How’s the water?” The young fish swim on for a while until one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

The novelist David Foster Wallace used this parable to illustrate a simple but profound truth: the most important and pervasive realities are often the hardest to see because they form the background conditions of our lives.

For modern civilisation, energy and the cooperation required to harness it have long been that invisible “water”. Since the Industrial Revolution, societies have operated within a rare period of expanding energy abundance that has enabled extraordinary economic growth, technological progress, and improvements in human well-being. Yet many of the crises that define our age suggest that the conditions sustaining that progress are shifting.

From geopolitical instability in the Middle East and the systemic risks associated with climate change, to the disruptive acceleration of artificial intelligence and the rapid spread of misinformation through social media, our world increasingly feels as though it is under strain.

These challenges are often treated as separate problems, but they may be symptoms of a deeper issue: the difficulty of sustaining large-scale cooperation in an increasingly complex and resource-constrained world.

At its core, the challenge is institutional. As the biologist Edward O. Wilson famously observed, “We have created a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

Our technological capabilities have advanced dramatically, but many of the institutions that govern our societies remain rooted in structures designed for a different era.

Research in cultural evolution offers insight into why this mismatch matters. The economist and evolutionary theorist Michael Muthukrishna argues that human prosperity is built on our unique ability to cooperate at scale through shared norms, institutions, and culture. However, institutional reforms that fail to consider these dynamics can unintentionally undermine cooperation. In societies where corruption is widespread, for example, transparency initiatives can sometimes backfire by revealing that norm violations are common, thereby reinforcing the perception that “everyone else is doing it.”

Such dynamics illustrate a broader pattern: poorly designed interventions can worsen the very problems they seek to solve.

Ecologists offer a vivid analogy. In 1935, cane toads were introduced into Australia to control agricultural pests. Instead, the invasive species spread rapidly and destabilised local ecosystems. Many policy responses risk creating similar unintended consequences when they treat complex systems with simplistic solutions.

If governance systems are to remain effective in an era of heightened complexity, they must evolve to sustain cooperation across wider networks of stakeholders.

One useful framework comes from the legal scholars Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout, who developed Team Production Theory in the field of corporate governance. Their work challenges the idea that a corporation is merely a “nexus of contracts” serving shareholders. Instead, they argue that firms are best understood as collaborative enterprises in which employees, managers, investors, and other contributors make firm-specific investments that collectively create value.

Within this framework, the board of directors functions as a mediating hierarchy. Its responsibility is not to privilege one stakeholder group over another, but to balance competing claims in ways that sustain the long-term viability of the organisation as a whole.

Extending this logic beyond the firm offers a useful lens for thinking about governance more broadly.

In an increasingly interconnected world, governments must increasingly operate as mediating hierarchies for society itself by balancing the interests of present citizens, future generations, and the ecological systems upon which all economic activity ultimately depends.

Seen this way, good governance is fundamentally about sustaining cooperation at scale. As Muthukrishna notes, corruption is not simply the absence of cooperation; it is cooperation that operates at too small a scale, within families, factions, or patronage networks without any sense of consequence for society as a whole.

Addressing this challenge requires more than institutional reform; it requires a shift in mindset. The leadership thinker Simon Sinek draws on the philosopher James P. Carse to distinguish between finite and infinite games. Finite games have fixed rules, clear competitors, and definitive winners. Infinite games, by contrast, have evolving rules and no final victory. Their purpose is simply to keep the game in play.

Many of today’s defining challenges, climate change, technological disruption, and geopolitical stability, are infinite games. They cannot be “won” in any final sense. They can only be managed through sustained cooperation, adaptation, and institutional learning.

Problems arise when leaders approach these challenges with a finite mindset. When institutions focus narrowly on short-term victories such as quarterly earnings, electoral cycles, or geopolitical advantage, they risk undermining the trust, cooperation, and innovation required to sustain long-term progress.

This insight has important implications for leadership education.

At Rhodes Business School, we emphasise the need for leaders who can think systemically about value creation in complex environments. Our 4E framework, Economy, Equity, Ethics, and Ecology recognises that economic systems cannot be separated from the social and environmental contexts in which they operate.

Energy systems illustrate this interdependence clearly. Energy researcher Charles Hall has shown that economic growth is closely linked to the availability of surplus energy. Expanding the technological frontier through advances in energy generation and efficiency remains essential to sustaining prosperity. But technological solutions alone are insufficient. Without institutions capable of coordinating large-scale cooperation, even abundant resources can be mismanaged or squandered.

Ethics and equity, therefore, remain central to governance. In periods of perceived scarcity, societies tend to retreat into smaller circles of trust, families, tribes, or political factions. Effective institutions must counteract this tendency by fostering inclusive systems that expand opportunities rather than concentrating them within narrow elites.

The King V Code of Corporate Governance recognises this reality through its emphasis on integrated thinking, which is the idea that organisations must understand the deep interdependencies between financial performance, social legitimacy, and environmental sustainability.

Ultimately, the challenge facing modern governance is not simply technical but civilisational.

Humanity possesses a periodic table of the elements, but, as Muthukrishna argues, we still lack a comparable framework for understanding how cultures, institutions, and incentives combine to sustain cooperation at scale.

The stakes are significant. Societies can respond to rising complexity by retreating into polarisation and short-term competition, allowing crises to compound and institutions to fragment. Or they can invest in governance systems capable of mediating competing interests while sustaining long-term collaboration.

The water around us is changing. The question is whether we recognise in time that it is water and that it is changing. Rather than waiting until the water freezes or disappears entirely, we must learn to see the systems that sustain our collective future and design institutions capable of keeping the game in play for generations to come.

As with that very first pair of earrings, every item made by the Mavros family in their House of Jewels is infused with love—love of their art, and love of Africa. This care and attention is evident in every facet of the business: from design and production to customer service.

It’s all about bringing the beauty of Africa to the world through extraordinary jewellery and sculptures inspired by Zimbabwe’s wildlife. The Mavros family feels most African products tend to be mere curios, which can become gimmicky; so they attempt instead to update native art or traditions for the modern, luxury market. For instance, Forbes’ Elephant Hair Bangle is based on the centuries-old African bracelet that was crafted by elders when a young hunter or warrior killed his first elephant. It was believed that wearing the bracelet would imbue the warrior with the might of the elephant on his journeys across the continent.

All their pieces are timeless heirlooms that can be handed down from generation to generation. Indeed, family heritage is a hallmark of the Patrick Mavros brand. They’re immensely proud to be the oldest European family in Zimbabwe, and to be part of the Great African Story.

With such a focus on heritage, it’s no surprise that Patrick Mavros puts the spotlight on wildlife conservation for generations to come. Not only are there collections embodying the beauty of African animals such as the crocodile, hippo and elephant—but also collections that mirror the wonders of the seas and oceans. The Ocean Tides collection is inspired by the tides in Mauritius which, once or twice a year, go so low that the coral reefs are exposed, revealing the true colours of the undersea world; Patrick Mavros has sourced gemstones reflecting these soft hues. Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was seen sporting earrings from this gorgeous collection during the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom.

And Patrick Jr’s Pangolin Collection, in collaboration with photographer Adrian Stern, is raising incredible awareness on a global scale for the plight of the world’s most trafficked mammal, the shy pangolin anteater. Ten percent of sales from this jewellery collection is donated to the Tikki Hywood Foundation’s Trust in Zimbabwe to help continue its conservation efforts. (See this edition’s The Object feature for a look at one of the pieces in this remarkably well-crafted collection.)