I had planned to record one podcast with Tito Alai.

We ended up recording three.

By the end of our first Pure Digital Passion Podcast session, we had travelled from his early childhood in Kirinyaga and Muhoroni through boarding school, Lenana School, the University of Nairobi and an extraordinary rise at East African Industries, now Unilever.

We had followed him from field sales in Kenya to brand management and then to London, where he took on international strategic responsibilities across Latin America and, later, other global markets.

We had only just reached Africa Online.

We had not yet discussed Kodak, Mo Ibrahim, Celtel, One Network, Celpay, the creation of Zain across the Middle East and Africa, Mimi Africa, Afreximbank or Tito’s current thinking on digital identities and the ownership of African data.

At that point, it became obvious that trying to compress Tito’s four-decade career into one podcast would not work.

What started as one interview therefore became a three-part series — and, taken together, one of the richest and most historically significant conversations I have recorded since launching the Pure Digital Passion Podcast.

A Kenyan Story That Became a Global Career

Tito’s career is deeply rooted in Africa, but it was never limited to the continent.

He began in Kenya, moved into international responsibilities from London, worked across Latin America and South Asia, managed a major Kodak category in Western Europe, led commercial strategy for Celtel from Amsterdam and later helped create Zain as a unified telecommunications brand across the Middle East and Africa.

That distinction matters.

Tito is not simply one of Kenya’s most experienced marketers. He is one of Kenya’s most globally accomplished marketing, brand-building and commercial leaders.

Yet, as this first conversation makes clear, the foundations of that global career were built through a series of very local and very human experiences.

The Past Leaves Fingerprints

Tito was born in Kirinyaga. His father was serving as a District Commissioner and, on the day Tito was born, had reportedly gone out with administration police officers to deal with a rogue elephant that was destroying crops.

That event contributed to one of Tito’s African names and became part of the family story surrounding his birth.

His early childhood was spent on a farm in Muhoroni before he was sent to boarding school in Kitale at just six years old.

That is young by any standard.

Listening to Tito reflect on those early years, one line stayed with me: the past leaves fingerprints on who we become.

Early independence, movement between different parts of Kenya, exposure to people from varied backgrounds and the expectation that he participate fully in school life all seem to have contributed to the adaptability that later defined his international career.

At Lenana School, Tito immersed himself in academics, sport, drama and leadership. He was good at both the sciences and humanities, which created a surprisingly consequential decision.

At the time, science subjects were widely treated as the prestigious route. Humanities were often presented as the fallback for students who could not handle mathematics, physics or chemistry.

Tito could handle them. He was performing strongly across the board.

But he chose economics, geography and French because those were the subjects that genuinely interested him.

That decision was controversial at home and reportedly created debate among his teachers. Yet it also offers an early glimpse of a quality that appears throughout his career: the willingness to make a considered choice even when the conventional path points elsewhere.

Loss, Responsibility and a Non-Linear Journey

Near the end of high school, Tito’s father died.

He completed his studies, returned to the family farm and spent an extended period helping to sort out family and estate matters before joining the University of Nairobi for a Bachelor of Commerce degree.

The university chapter was not entirely straightforward either.

Tito became involved in student leadership but, after his first year, concluded that he was bored and decided to drop out. He went home and told his mother he wanted to return to practical and entrepreneurial work.

Her response was remarkably calm.

Rather than panic, she asked him what harm it would do to have a degree “flapping around” somewhere in his life.

The argument worked.

Tito returned to university and completed his studies.

This may seem like a small anecdote inside a very long career, but I found it useful because successful careers are often retold as clean progressions. School. University. Graduate program. Promotion. International assignment. Senior leadership.

The lived reality is usually messier.

There are doubts, reversals, family responsibilities and periods when the next step is not obvious.

How Unilever Found a Wild Card

Unilever’s graduate-management program at East African Industries was one of the most prestigious career routes available to young Kenyan professionals at the time.

Tito did not initially assume he would be selected.

Although he graduated with honours, he was not among the obvious academic stars who would normally be expected to dominate the process. What appears to have opened the door was an additional request for candidates who had demonstrated leadership potential.

Tito became the wild card.

The selection process involved case studies, group discussions and observation of how candidates worked with others. He received an offer from Unilever and another from Coca-Cola.

His final choice was influenced, at least partly, by the fact that Unilever was offering KES 9,000 while Coca-Cola was offering KES 8,500.

The extra KES 500 mattered.

It is a wonderfully practical detail inside a career that would eventually span some of the world’s largest markets.

Why Starting in Sales Mattered

Once inside East African Industries, Tito went through a structured graduate-development process that exposed him to different parts of the business and paired him with a senior mentor.

His first substantive role was in field sales.

He received a company vehicle, took responsibility for a territory, visited retailers, collected orders and learned where the commercial reality of the business actually lived.

For Tito, the field was not a temporary inconvenience before the “real” marketing job began. It was the place where he learned how products moved, how retailers behaved, how targets were achieved and how commercial decisions translated into everyday market outcomes.

He also learned to organize his territory aggressively. His goal was to complete as much of his target as possible early in the week, creating room to pursue incentives and additional volume.

There is a larger lesson here for modern marketers.

Marketing can become dangerously detached from the point of transaction. Teams can spend enormous amounts of time discussing audiences, funnels, campaigns and propositions without spending enough time where customers are actually making choices.

Tito’s field-sales experience meant that when he later became a brand manager, he understood the operational consequences of the decisions being made at head office.

Responsibility Without Authority

The transition from sales into brand management was not immediately attractive to Tito.

He enjoyed the freedom, pace and direct feedback of the field. Brand management moved him into a role where he was accountable for a product’s performance but did not directly control all the resources required to deliver it.

He had responsibility without authority.

To succeed, he had to persuade colleagues in production, finance, supply chain, sales and communications to align behind the brand’s objectives.

That is one of the most transferable leadership lessons in the entire conversation.

As people become more senior, their results increasingly depend on people who do not report directly to them. Formal authority matters less than clarity, credibility, influence and the ability to create shared ownership.

Tito progressed across detergents, foods and personal-care brands. He worked on major local portfolios and made presentations that brought him into contact with Unilever’s wider international organization.

That is how the London opportunity emerged.

The Interview He Did Not Know Was an Interview

Tito was told he would travel to London for exposure and informal meetings. He was also advised not to expect the international position being discussed.

He spent several days meeting people, returned to Kenya and resumed his work.

Months later, calls began coming from London asking when he would report for duty.

Tito initially assumed they had reached the wrong person.

He had not realized that the trip had effectively been an interview — or that he had been selected.

At 29, he moved to London.

His first international role involved strategic market support for Latin America. The change in scale was immediate. He remembers looking at the numbers for Brazil and wondering whether there were too many zeros because the volumes were so much larger than anything he had managed in Kenya.

But the bigger transition was not geographical. It was professional.

Tito moved from being an operating manager with direct control over brands, factories and sales activity to a strategic manager who had to influence senior people across markets and specialist centres of excellence.

At first, the role felt vague and even unsettling. He could no longer judge his performance through daily or weekly numbers. His impact would emerge over a much longer period.

That shift — from doing to enabling, from direct control to strategic influence — is one many high-performing professionals struggle to make.

Why He Left One of the World’s Best Companies

After almost a decade at Unilever, Tito asked what came next.

The answer was that he would begin another long cycle: return to an operating company at a more senior level, move back into regional leadership and perhaps eventually return to a global role.

It was a strong career path.

But Tito wanted to maintain what he calls a steep learning curve.

Moving to another consumer-goods company would have given him a new organization, but not necessarily a new world. He had already worked across product categories, countries and strategic levels.

He wanted to start again in an industry he did not know.

That opportunity came through Africa Online.

The company was part of Africa’s emerging internet economy and was entering the stage where a startup had to become a scalable, professionally managed pan-African business.

For Tito, it offered a blank sheet of paper, a return to Africa and a completely new category to understand.

That is where Part 1 ends — and where Part 2 begins.

My Biggest Takeaway

What stood out most strongly from this first conversation was not a single promotion or company name.

It was Tito’s relationship with learning.

He did not treat curiosity as a personality trait. He treated it as a career strategy.

He moved when the learning curve began to flatten. He accepted roles that required him to operate without complete certainty. He repeatedly entered spaces where his previous experience was useful but insufficient.

That combination — confidence in what you know and humility about what you do not know — is rare.

It is also one of the clearest explanations for how a career can move from field sales in Kenya to global strategy, European market leadership, pan-African telecommunications and brand building across the Middle East.

We were only at the end of Part 1.

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