Speaking and advisory

Talks, masterclasses and advice grounded in things actually built

I speak, teach and advise on the subjects I have worked in first-hand: education technology in hard settings, national digital skills, teaching quality, and the practical craft of building and pitching new ventures.

Topics

Where I can be useful

Building EdTech for underserved communities

Practical lessons from Allon Fasaha and TechXplorer: offline-first design, accelerated learning, working through schools, and why constraints are the design brief.

Digital skills and the future of work

What national digital literacy frameworks get right and wrong, drawn from consulting on Nigeria's national and state strategies.

Critical thinking and student engagement

Teaching approaches for diverse, widening participation cohorts, from my classroom and academic leadership work in UK higher education.

Inclusive innovation and responsible capital

How social innovations grow, why good ideas fail without the right support, and what patient capital could do differently.

From product building to academic leadership

What transfers, what does not, and what founders and educators can usefully steal from each other.

Designing learning around real barriers

Language, connectivity, trust and time: how learning products and programmes succeed by respecting the constraints their learners live with.

Masterclasses and founder support

Working sessions, not lectures

Alongside talks, I run hands-on masterclasses and support founders directly. These draw on my years building and growing Steamledge and on the business and entrepreneurship teaching I do in higher education.

Disciplined entrepreneurship

A structured masterclass on taking a venture from idea to evidence, built around rigorous customer and market discipline rather than luck and volume.

Design thinking

Practical sessions on understanding users properly and designing products and services around real barriers, tested against my own product work.

Go to market

How early ventures actually find distribution, pricing and first customers, with honest examples of what worked and failed in my own companies.

Pitch deck reviews

A structured audit of your deck: narrative, evidence, numbers and the ask, with specific rewrites rather than vague encouragement.

Formats

How I work with organisations

  • Keynotes and conference talks for education, technology and development audiences.
  • Masterclasses and workshops on disciplined entrepreneurship, design thinking, go to market, EdTech product design and teaching practice.
  • Pitch deck audits for founders preparing to raise or apply to programmes.
  • Advisory engagements for EdTech founders, education institutions and public-sector digital skills teams.
  • Panels and moderated conversations on inclusive innovation across Africa and the UK.
  • Content collaboration. I document my own journey in short videos and posts, and I am open to collaborating on content with organisations and creators working on education, entrepreneurship and social innovation.

A short biography for programmes is available on the About page.