In a compelling Women’s Month address hosted by PSG Financial Services on 6 August, technology entrepreneur, Rapelang Rabana, delivered a thought-provoking talk on the transformative power of technology.
Currently serving as Co-Chief Digital Officer at Imagine Worldwide, she shared three pivotal lessons that have shaped her remarkable journey in the tech industry.
Her first lesson centres on the extraordinary value of one’s unique worldview.
Reflecting on her university days at UCT, she described the anxiety-inducing realisation that “actually the adults don’t know what they’re doing either, and absolutely everybody was winging it.”
Rather than being paralysed by this discovery, she embraced it as liberation, “if nothing was written in stone,” experimentation became possible.
This perspective led to the creation of Yago, one of the earliest mobile web services developed before WhatsApp, iPhone, or Android devices existed.
“Why must we be constrained to this way of communication?” Rabana asked, leading her team to develop solutions that predated today’s messaging platforms.
Her second lesson challenges the misconception that technology requires deep technical expertise. Instead, she advocates for tech fluency, understanding technology as a tool for removing constraints rather than viewing it as an impenetrable “black box”.
She explained how this perspective has proven transformative in her current role at Imagine Worldwide.
The organisation operates across seven African countries, providing tablet-based learning programmes that address a critical educational crisis.
“Currently on the continent, about 20% of children will become literate and numerate by the age of 10 or by the end of grade four,” she shared. “And we have done the research, very rigorous randomised control trials that demonstrate that we can take that to 60%, effectively tripling the performance of traditional education systems and working in the languages of national instruction, Malawi, Chewa, Tanzania and Swahili, being able to work entirely offline and providing solar systems to charge the devices.”
The tablets and software are specifically designed for a child who has never seen or used a tablet.
The programme is expected to serve one million children across Malawi, Tanzania and Sierra Leone by the end of the year.
“It’s a very ambitious programme, but essentially for me it’s imperative because most people believe that poor people don’t deserve technology, and this is where the biggest need is.
So, if we can demonstrate that edtech solutions can work in low- and middle-income countries and be sustainable and scalable, it’ll change the game for how education, development, and aid work.”
Rabana’s third lesson focuses on personal mastery developing mental resilience and clarity in an age of artificial intelligence.
She emphasises the importance of “mastering your own mind so that you’re more useful than a robot.”
