Part 1 of my conversation with Tito Alai ended just as he was leaving Unilever and moving into Africa Online.

That transition matters because it captures one of the central themes running through Tito’s career: the deliberate pursuit of reinvention.

By the time he left Unilever, Tito had worked in field sales, brand management, product-group leadership, regional strategy and global brand development. He had operated in Kenya and from London, with responsibilities touching Latin America, South Asia and lower-income consumer markets worldwide.

He could easily have moved into another major consumer-goods company.

Instead, he chose the internet.

At the time, that was not the safe or obvious decision it might appear to be in hindsight. Africa Online was part of a young category, operating in markets where most people did not yet understand what the internet was, why it mattered or what problem it solved.

For Tito, that was precisely the attraction.

Leaving a Global Machine for a Blank Sheet of Paper

Unilever had taught Tito how an exceptional multinational organization worked. Africa Online gave him the opportunity to help build the systems, narrative and discipline of a Pan-African technology company almost from scratch.

He joined as Director of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service at a point when African Lakes had invested in the company and the business was moving from startup energy towards institutional scale.

That transition is one of the most difficult stages in the life of any growing company.

The behaviour that helps a startup survive its early years does not always help it scale. Informal systems, heroic individuals and improvised processes can work when a company is small. They become fragile when the organization expands across countries, teams and customer segments.

Tito’s task was not to eliminate the entrepreneurial spirit. It was to make the company more coherent and repeatable without destroying what made it dynamic.

Marketing a Product People Could Not Yet See

One of the most interesting sections of our conversation concerns the difficulty of marketing the internet in Africa during the late 1990s.

Today, internet connectivity is embedded in almost every part of work and daily life. At the time, the category itself had to be explained.

A technical team might describe bandwidth, connectivity, infrastructure or “solutions.” But the customer could reasonably ask: what exactly is the problem you are solving for me?

That distinction remains relevant today.

Technology companies often market from the inside out. They describe the product using the language of the people who built it rather than the language of the people expected to adopt it.

Tito brought a consumer-goods mindset into the internet business. He asked how the service could be translated into needs, benefits and propositions that made sense across different markets, languages, cultures and income levels.

This was not about oversimplifying technology. It was about making it meaningful.

“My World, My Provider” and the Power of One Story

I have my own memories of this period because Africa Online is where I started my career.

I was much closer to the ground, while Tito was operating at the strategic apex of the organisation. What I remember clearly is the inconsistency that existed across markets before the brand and communications became more unified.

Different countries produced different materials, presentations and interpretations of what Africa Online was supposed to represent.

The “My World, My Provider” campaign helped create a more coherent internal and external idea. Documentation, sales materials and communications began to look and sound like they came from one organisation.

That consistency mattered for customers, employees and investors.

A Pan-African company cannot scale if it reinvents its identity in every country. At the same time, it cannot succeed by imposing a rigid global template that ignores local context.

The real skill lies in defining the core idea that must remain constant and then allowing the execution to adapt.

That balance — global consistency with local relevance — would reappear later in Tito’s work at Celtel and Zain.

The Dot-Com Bust and the Human Cost of Scale

Africa Online’s growth ambitions were eventually hit by the dot-com crash.

The business entered a period of uncertainty and Tito also faced the personal realities of an intensely international career. His family was based in the United Kingdom, the head office was in Nairobi and the operating companies were spread across the continent.

Long before remote work became a mainstream concept, Tito was effectively working across locations, flying between the United Kingdom, Kenya and other African markets.

It sounds glamorous when reduced to a sentence.

In practice, it demanded constant trade-offs between leadership responsibilities, travel and family life.

This is another theme that often disappears from executive biographies. International careers create opportunity and exposure, but they also carry a personal cost that must be actively managed.

Kodak and the Challenge of Growth in a Mature Market

Tito’s next move was to Eastman Kodak.

He was initially recruited to manage consumer imaging across approximately 90 countries spanning Africa, the Middle East and Central Europe. He was then appointed to lead the company’s core film category across Western Europe.

The new role challenged one of the assumptions people had made about his career.

Tito had demonstrated an ability to drive growth in emerging and expanding markets. But could he grow a mature category where penetration was already high and the market itself was not expanding rapidly?

His answer was direct: if the market is not growing, growth must come through market share.

That meant taking business from competitors.

The Kodak chapter is fascinating because it sits at the edge of one of the biggest disruptions in modern business history. Film was still enormously important, but digital photography was beginning to reshape the economics and behaviour of the category.

Kodak understood many of the technologies involved. The harder challenge was organisational and commercial: how does a company embrace an innovation that threatens the very business model that made it successful?

This remains one of the defining questions of digital transformation.

Disruption rarely arrives because an organization knows nothing about the future. It often arrives because the organization knows exactly what the future could do to its existing revenue, assets, incentives and identity.

Mo Ibrahim and a Different Vision for African Telecoms

Tito was performing strongly at Kodak when Mo Ibrahim’s organization came calling.

The company was then known as Mobile Systems International and would later become Celtel.

Mo Ibrahim’s central conviction was that Africans deserved telecommunications technology as good as anything available in Europe or elsewhere in the world.

That may sound obvious today. At the time, Africa was often treated as a market that would receive older, cheaper or second-tier technology after other regions had moved ahead.

Celtel rejected that logic.

It pursued GSM, acquired licenses across multiple African markets and set out to build a connected pan-African network.

Tito joined during a period when the company was still defining how to translate that technical footprint into a compelling commercial proposition.

From Tariff Plans to Consumer-Led Innovation

One of Tito’s early observations was that telecommunications companies often called tariff plans “products.”

From a consumer-goods perspective, that felt limited. Changing a price structure and giving it a name was not the same as creating a genuinely new solution to a customer problem.

Celtel began looking more closely at what consumers were doing.

In Zambia, the company observed that airtime purchased in one location was being activated in another. That suggested people were using prepaid airtime to support family members or employees remotely.

This contributed to Me2U, which enabled one user to transfer airtime to another.

According to Tito’s account, Celpay developed from the next layer of behaviour: people were not only transferring airtime; some recipients were exchanging it for cash or goods.

The consumer had already created the workaround.

The role of the innovator was to recognize the pattern and make the process more reliable.

One Network and the Cost of African Borders

The episode also introduces the thinking behind Celtel’s One Network.

At the time, crossing a border could transform an ordinary regional call into an expensive international roaming transaction. This was especially irrational in African regions where communities, families and business relationships extended across national boundaries.

Celtel asked a deceptively simple question: why should the customer experience change so dramatically because a person crossed an artificial border while remaining on the same wider network?

The company began removing those barriers.

Tito recalls that traffic increased dramatically when the cost friction was reduced. The lesson was not merely about price. It was about understanding suppressed demand.

Sometimes customers are not uninterested in a service. They are responding rationally to a structure that makes the service unnecessarily difficult or expensive.

Remove the friction and the market can behave very differently.

My Biggest Takeaway

Part 2 is about reinvention, but it is also about translation.

Tito translated consumer-goods thinking into internet services. He translated growth principles from emerging markets into a mature European category. He translated technical telecommunications infrastructure into propositions that made sense to African consumers.

Across all three settings, the discipline remained remarkably consistent:

Observe the market. Understand the human behaviour. Define the real problem. Build a clear proposition. Create organisational alignment. Measure commercial results.

The industry changed. The geography changed. The strategic level changed.

The core marketing discipline did not.

Part 3 takes that principle even further by unpacking the detailed Celpay story, Celtel’s expansion into major markets, the creation of Zain across the Middle East and Africa, and Tito’s conviction that Africans must take greater ownership of their digital identities and innovation narratives.

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