Pieter Nel

The Mastercard Foundation 2013 - 2014

Alumni

Legatum Fellow

From:

South Africa

Sector:

IT/Telecom

Location:

Kenya

Degree:

MBA, Sloan Fellow

Pieter Nel, seeking to use his experience in building and managing large scalable social platforms in emerging markets to address the more fundamental economic challenges in Africa, founded Kuza Mobile, Inc. to achieve this.

With Kuza, Pieter built a simple solution allowing people to create a web presence from a basic feature phone in about five minutes. Using their phone, entrepreneurs can create micro ads that are instantly broadcast to users in their area, accept recommendations and feedback from customers through various digital channels, and even create business cards on their phones and get them printed anywhere with an internet connection.

Previously, Pieter was the CTO of Mxit, at the time Africa’s largest social network, providing mobile instant messaging to some 40 million registered users.

Pieter is pursuing his MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management and holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electronics Engineering from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.