Ross Macdonald
Curiosity. Innovation. Drive.
Ross is a seasoned entrepreneur and technologist with a passion for leveraging technology to deliver meaningful social impact.
Ross believes in the transformative power of ideas and collective action.
Career Highlights
Ross qualified as a civil engineer and also holds an MBA. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, countries and domains. His outlook is fuelled by his belief that good ideas plus energy and execution takes you to the starting gate. He believes long-term success today also has to be sustainable and he increasingly focuses on the breakthrough thinking organisations and individuals need to face an uncertain future.
Conceived and executed the MTN international expansion strategy into Africa and the Middle East.
Today the largest regional mobile operator with over 250m subscribers.
Holds and has held directorships of numerous listed and private companies in Africa, UK and USA
Start-up mindsets, acceleration and growth.
Co-founded businesses in digital infrastructure, software, hi-tech manufacturing, renewable energy, fintech and telecommunications.
Innovation systems, early adoption and spread.
Sometimes the only way forward is still to be imagined
I was born in South Africa at the height of Apartheid, a world where racial segregation wasn’t just normal—it was law, culture, the air we breathed. Although my family was ‘enlightened’ and critical of the Government, not so much that we were prepared to go to jail for our beliefs.
We kept our heads down and stayed out of trouble.
Then, I got drafted. Two years mandatory conscription to fight against communism, or so they said. It was the Cold War—Reagan vs. Brezhnev – and we were just foot soldiers in a game we didn’t really understand. Later as a university student in the ‘80s, I watched the world turn itself inside out. SA was burning with protests in the townships while PW Botha’s National Party started turning in on itself. I lived history in the making. The Berlin Wall was crumbling, the USSR was imploding, and communism was breathing its last.
By the early 90’s after travelling for a year, a stint as an engineer and the obligatory MBA, I was fortunate to find myself at the coal face as the beast of Apartheid was dismantled and SA entered a new democratic era. I was a young analyst at M-Net/MultiChoice, the innovative PAYTV business, when they threw me into the deep end of business planning for what would become South Africa’s second mobile operator—MTN.
MTN was the first so-called Black Empowerment deal in post-Apartheid SA, a strange collection of international Telcos, state-owned enterprises, Black owned businesses and the banks. I was part of sensitive negotiations between parties who only a few years before had been avowed enemies.
Timing, they say, is everything. My entrée into this new business world coincided with the digital and internet revolution sweeping the world. I was quickly elevated to a senior business development role, convincing the world that Africa wasn’t just a backwater—it was the next frontier. Rwanda, just two years after the genocide, was still reeling and bleeding, but we set up a mobile network there in 3 months and we gave the country a lifeline. We did the same in Uganda. Some of my experiences were bizarre and unique – in Kinshasa, I watched a full-blown civil war rage (in Brazzaville) across the Congo River from my hotel room, like a war journalist.
Nigeria was a rollercoaster. We won and lost three licences in the chaos after Sani Abacha died in the arms of a call girl and the military grip loosened. We bought out the state-owned Telco in Cameroon after losing a bidding war to Orange. Africa had fewer landlines than Manhattan back then, but I knew we could leapfrog the entire landline era and connect the continent with mobile networks.
Today, there are over a billion mobile subscribers in Africa, and it’s no stretch to say that mobile connectivity has reshaped the continent—socially, economically, politically.
