George Njuguna
Kenyan tech strategist George Njuguna spent five whirlwind years as Safaricom PLC’s chief information officer turning East Africa’s largest telco into a cloud-first, software-driven enterprise. Appointed in 2019, the Nairobi-born executive inherited legacy switch rooms and a 300-person IT staff; by 2024 he had scaled the technology workforce to 800, embedded Agile squads across every business line, and migrated mission-critical workloads onto hybrid clouds that cut release cycles from months to days. His playbook, radical transparency on KPIs, a “one backlog” governance model, and 24/7 DevSecOps pods, powered the launch of digital products that now handle more than half of Safaricom’s revenue.
Beyond code deployments, Njuguna championed STEM apprenticeships that fast-tracked 200 Kenyan graduates into engineering roles and pushed for open-API standards that let fintechs plug seamlessly into M-PESA. Recognised throughout the region as a CIO who speaks both boardroom EBITDA and container orchestration, he now advises pan-African scale-ups on transformation strategy while mapping his next operating role in AI-enabled infrastructure. With Kenya vying to become the continent’s innovation nerve centre, Njuguna’s mission remains clear: build platforms that make African ideas globally competitive and mentor the talent that will take them even further.