Keynote Speakers
Marlon Parker is an adjunct professor at the UCT GSB and the founder the Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs), a global movement that has inspired replication of the model in 23 countries and impacted more than 10 million people since its inception. He has been listed as one of the 100 World Class South Africans, he is an alumnus of President Obama’s Young African Leaders initiative and an honorary faculty member of the International School of Digital Transformation. He was also selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Dangote Fellow and an Ashoka Fellow for his work in Social Entrepreneurship. He was the co-founder of JamiiX that was the backbone to one of the largest mobile chat counseling networks in the world, reaching more than 4.5 million people since its inception. He was the Lead SA Hero of 2015 and was listed by Quartz as one of the African Innovators of 2017. Parker has done extensive work with organisations such as Mozilla, BBC, Facebook, Finnish Foreign Ministry, UNWomen, Naspers, WeChat, World Bank and Accenture.
Francis B. Nyamnjoh is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana, where he was awarded the “Senior Arts Researcher of the Year” prize for 2003. In October 2012 he received a University of Cape Town Excellence Award for “Exceptional Contribution as a Professor in the Faculty of Humanities”, an award renewed in 2017 and again in 2022. In September 2021, he was elected as a fellow by the College of Fellows of the University of Cape Town, in recognition of his research. He is recipient of the “ASU African Hero 2013” annual award by the African Students Union, Ohio University, USA; of the 2014 Eko Prize for African Literature; and of the ASAUK 2018 Fage & Oliver Prize for the best monograph for his book #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa.
He is: a B1 rated Professor and Researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF); a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science since August 2011; a fellow of the African Academy of Science since December 2014; a fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa since 2016; Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) since 2019; Chair of the Board of Langaa Research and Publishing Centre in Bamenda, Cameroon since 2005; and was Chair of the Editorial Board of the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press from January 2011 to December 2019. His scholarly books of relevance to ICT4D include: Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005); (co-edited with Ingrid Brudvig) Mobilities, ICTs and Marginality in Africa: Comparative Perspectives (2016); Incompleteness: Donald Trump, Populism and Citizenship (2022); and Incompleteness, Mobility and Conviviality: Ad. E. Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 Frobenius-Institut, Goethe-University (2024). His current research interests include: Incompleteness, Mobility, Encounters, Belonging, Citizenship and Conviviality.