Selected work
Ideas are useful when they survive contact with reality.
- People reached through initiatives I’ve built, led and co-created
- 400,000+People reached through initiatives I’ve built, led and co-created
- research interviews conducted
- 300+research interviews conducted
- countries served
- 12countries served
How the work connects
One question kept becoming another.
01
Human Future Design
How is technology changing people and society?
02
Data Privacy by Design
How should we design technology around human needs, rights and behaviour?
03
Diwala
Can trusted information about a person become portable rather than institution-bound?
04
Eviia
Can that trust infrastructure help essential systems understand what is actually happening on the frontline?
Look closer.
The interesting problem is rarely the one written in the brief.
Eviia
Founder · Research and venture development in health systems, identity and frontline data
The observation
A large amount of frontline health activity is difficult to verify, connect and use.
Evidence of care is often fragmented, retrospective or dependent on infrastructure that is not consistently available. Care happens in a village, a clinic corridor, a home visit, and what happened there travels through paper, memory and patchy reporting. Ministries plan with numbers that arrived months late. Funders audit work they cannot verify.
The hypothesis
Reporting after the factEvidence created through the work
The question
Can evidence of care be created as part of the workflow itself, rather than reconstructed afterwards?
- Why it is hard
- The problem is not a lack of health data. It is that identity, competence, care delivered and outcomes are rarely connected at the moment the work happens. What institutions eventually see is often a reconstruction of care, not a trusted record of it.
- What I am exploring
- How identity, role, workflow and verification might operate as one connected system in low resource environments, rather than as separate procurement lines.
- What I am testing for
- Whether a trusted record created through frontline work can become useful infrastructure - for workers, providers, funders and health systems - rather than another isolated reporting layer.
STATUS: ACTIVE RESEARCH AND VENTURE DEVELOPMENT.
Connect differently.
Some opportunities appear only when sectors, cultures or disciplines collide.
Enterprise Operations Platform
Project and product director · Research through UAT in eight months
I was brought in to fix an action tracking problem. Research found something else.
In an oil and gas operation, decisions were made in one room, executed in another and reported in a third. Ownership, escalation and visibility simply dissolved as work crossed between crews, sites and management layers. The organisation did not need another task list or complext enterpise system. It needed awareness and accountability expressed as a system adaptbale for each user group.
Operational complexityExecutable product logic
- Field research to enterprise UAT
- 8 monthsField research to enterprise UAT
- Management layers modelled into one system
- 6Management layers modelled into one system
- Shipped to a multi site workforce
- Web + mobileShipped to a multi site workforce
- The method
- On-site observation first, then shadowing, workflow mapping and structured interviews across every layer involved in the work.
- What I identified
- The systems reflected how work was supposed to happen, not how it actually happened. Fragmented tools, paperwork and bureaucracy obscured what was moving, what was stuck and where attention was needed.
- The pace
- Research to production UAT in eight months, with product logic, architecture and rollout running in parallel rather than in sequence.
What it shows: ambiguity taken to an executable system, inside an organisation with real constraints and real consequences.
Go again.
Building means learning quickly enough to change the answer.
I treat methodology as something that should evolve with the work. New learning gets absorbed quickly, then translated into better systems, processes and ways of working so the team can move with speed without losing clarity or quality.
Diwala
Co-founder & CEO · 2017 to 2025
Building trust infrastructure before the category had a playbook.
An early bet on decentralised identity and verifiable credential infrastructure, then years spent proving it could work across institutions, technical systems and African markets.
Market proof
- people reached
- 100,000+people reached
- organisations
- 88+organisations
- African markets
- 12African markets
Built from early research and pilots into infrastructure adopted by organisations across multiple markets.
Technical proof
- demonstrated across credential infrastructure
- Full interoperabilitydemonstrated across credential infrastructure
- SSI · DIDs · W3C Verifiable Credentials · OpenID4VP
- Open standardsSSI · DIDs · W3C Verifiable Credentials · OpenID4VP
- credentials designed to move across organisations and systems
- Portabilitycredentials designed to move across organisations and systems
Diwala moved beyond proprietary credential software into interoperable trust infrastructure, proving credentials could be issued, held and verified across systems rather than trapped inside one platform.
Company building proof
- external capital raised
- $1.7Mexternal capital raised
- building through an emerging market
- 8 yearsbuilding through an emerging market
- international team built
- 15 people · 9 countriesinternational team built
Product. Fundraising. Partnerships. Standards. Commercial models. Team. Market development. Operations. Not a short innovation pilot, but years of company building while the category itself kept changing.
The work, in four chapters
I
The early bet
I co-founded Diwala around a shift the market had not named yet: proof about people would have to become portable, user controlled and verifiable across systems.
- years before identity wallets became a global conversation
- 2017years before identity wallets became a global conversation
- first blockchain-backed verifiable credentials issued in Africa
- 2018first blockchain-backed verifiable credentials issued in Africa
II
From technical possibility to real world use
Cryptographic verification was never the hard part. The question was whether institutions would issue, people would use, other systems would recognise, and a business could be built on top.
- demonstrated with Jobs for the Future, 2023
- Full interoperabilitydemonstrated with Jobs for the Future, 2023
- credentials recognised outside our own ecosystem
- OpenID4VPcredentials recognised outside our own ecosystem
III
The company kept changing because the market kept changing
Holding the thesis while rebuilding almost everything around it: product, ICP, commercial model, partnerships and organisation.
- organisations in the discovery that rebuilt the ICP
- 500+organisations in the discovery that rebuilt the ICP
- sustained quarter over quarter growth after the reset
- 18 monthssustained quarter over quarter growth after the reset
- operating cost reduction during adaptation
- 80%operating cost reduction during adaptation
IV
Backing, and what it taught me to build for
Capital, public funding and institutional validation followed the same argument the technology made — and left me knowing how to build inside a moving market.
- raised from investors, venture ecosystem and public funding
- $1.7Mraised from investors, venture ecosystem and public funding
- grant support by Innovation Norway Visjon 2030
- Stefan George · TRK · SOSV EMURGO grant support by Innovation Norway Visjon 2030
I back important shifts early, connect impact with commercial opportunity, and build the product, partnerships and systems required to turn them into something the market can actually use.
What it shows: eight years commercialising an emerging trust infrastructure category across difficult markets, with evidence of adoption, interoperability, capital formation and company building.
Building something in this territory — a venture, a product problem, or a market that doesn’t have a category yet?
Where else the work shows up
The same way of working, in rooms that look nothing alike.
Advisory and collaboration, where the contribution is a way of seeing rather than a delivery.
Ciima x Travel
Tourism · Market formation · New engagement, unnamed
A destination can hold enormous attention and still capture almost none of the demand that attention creates.
I advise, connect and co-create
DC4EU
European digital identity · Interoperability
The European Digital Identity Wallet only works if credentials survive the journey across borders, institutions and legacy systems.
As an Observer Expert, I brought the perspective of having built identity infrastructure outside Europe - grounding discussions and strategy in what adoption actually requires from the people and organisations expected to use it.
Credential Engine
Standards · Skills and workforce data
Qualifications and skills mean different things in every system that stores them, which quietly blocks mobility everywhere.
As a principal member of the CTDL Advisory Group, I advised on the standard using market evidence from issuing credentials at scale.
Where the method comes from
Before any of it was a company, it was research and field work.
What people say, what institutions intend and what actually happens are usually three different things. Learning to sit with that gap is the whole method.
- Human Future Design
- 48 interviews with leaders at Google, Apple, Facebook, O’Reilly and beyond, asking what technology was doing to people. Research and a documentary, not a job.
- Data Privacy by Design
- Lead researcher on how products can be designed around agency rather than extraction. It is where the identity work started.
- Development and field work
- International development, sport for development with the Norwegian Football Federation, grassroots programmes and cultural institutions. Anthropology and political science underneath all of it.
SPEAKING & APPEARANCES
Stages, panels, pitches and delegations.
A selection of rooms across technology, markets, society and ethics — from startup stages to development banks.
Slush 100
Top 10 · Helsinki
SXSW
Pitch · Delegation · Austin
Mastercard
Financial Inclusion Summit
IDB
Invited speaker · Panama
Different industries. Recurring questions.
- What is changing?
- What hasn’t caught up?
- Where is the friction?
- What becomes possible because of it?
- What would it take to make that possibility real?
Working on something that doesn’t fit neatly into a box?
Those tend to be the conversations I find most interesting. Most of them start with a venture to build, a product that has outgrown its original shape, or a market that doesn’t have a category yet.