About Jade Willemse
Design Director, Absa Africa Regional Operations
Jade Willemse leads the Absa Africa Regional Operation Design team, building human-centred digital solutions for nine markets across Africa. With a degree in languages, an honours in professional writing and translation and an MBA, she brings a rare blend of linguistic precision, cultural fluency, and commercial acumen to her work.
Jade bridges business strategy with human insight, ensuring every digital solution not only resonates emotionally, but delivers measurable business impact. She’s a bold communicator, a systems thinker and a leader passionate about regional relevance, strategic collaboration and meaningful digital innovation.
Talk topic
Tech vs Human: The Strategic Advantage of Empathy
In a world obsessed with scaling technology, we're placing the focus on what truly matters: humanity. Our belief is simple; the future of Africa isn’t about technology - it’s about people. And a solution that doesn’t resonate with people, rarely scales.
When you work across nine countries, as our Absa ARO team does, the flaws in the “copy-paste” approach to innovation become impossible to ignore. Real impact doesn’t come from dumping global solutions. It comes from embedding, listening and designing in context.
Jade will use Absa’s work on Digital Wallets to explain this philosophy in practice; not as a story of building yet another financial tool, but of creating something deeply local, personal, and grounded in empathy, trust and dignity. When you design with people (not just for them), you build relevance and trust - and that’s what truly scales.