At 18, Kgalaletso Rakau was certain his future would begin outside South Africa. He applied for scholarships, imagined university abroad and waited for the opportunity that would change everything. Instead, rejection arrived.
Years later, Rakau is based in Sweden, working as a Strategy and Innovation Manager at Volvo Group, on the front lines of technologies reshaping logistics, manufacturing and mobility. The journey, however, looks far neater in hindsight than it ever felt while he was living it.
“A delay is not always a denial,” he says, reflecting on the disappointments that redirected rather than destroyed his ambitions.
His first international break came through work. After joining Unilever’s graduate programme, a director backed him for an opportunity at the company’s global design centre in Germany. It was Rakau’s first trip outside South Africa and his first glimpse of a global career.
“That experience shattered my limited understanding of what an international career could look like,” he recalls. It also taught him the power of advocates: people willing to speak for your abilities “in rooms where you are not present.”
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Rakau kept building. He summited Mount Kilimanjaro, co-founded food-truck business Seven Khalaz and secured support through the SAB Tholoana programme. Entrepreneurship taught him to turn ideas into tangible solutions and strengthened his desire to create opportunities for others.
At 24, Sweden finally called. Rakau received the Swedish Institute Scholarship, enabling him to pursue his master’s degree. Before university, he spent the summer of 2018 in the United Kingdom on the Drivers for Change social entrepreneurship programme.
His plan was initially to return home after graduating, but the pandemic intervened. During his final year, he co-founded Wavi Analytics with classmates. The startup did not become the giant they had imagined, but it gave them invaluable experience in building a product, finding customers, and navigating uncertainty.
That builder’s instinct now sits at the heart of his work at Volvo Group, where Rakau explores robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, digital twins and other emerging technologies. Physical AI particularly excites him because of its potential to allow intelligent machines to perform real-world tasks.
“The objective is not simply to replace human effort,” he explains, but to allow people to focus on work requiring “judgment, creativity and problem-solving” while technology handles more strenuous or repetitive tasks.
For Rakau, Africa cannot afford to watch technological revolutions from the sidelines. He believes African professionals must participate while technologies such as AI, robotics and quantum technology are still being shaped.
“The greatest risk is not that African professionals fail to predict every technological development,” he says. “It is that we remain permanent consumers of solutions designed elsewhere instead of becoming researchers, builders, investors and decision-makers ourselves.”
Yet his global career has not erased home. If anything, distance has sharpened his appreciation for what South Africa gave him: resourcefulness, resilience and the ability to navigate complexity.
“The goal is not to become less South African,” he says. “It is to develop the skills, confidence and cultural awareness to contribute anywhere while remaining grounded in who you are.”
Behind the scholarships, international career, and innovation work lay loneliness, self-doubt, and failed plans. Faith became an anchor when certainty disappeared.
His advice to young South Africans is grounded not in motivational slogans, but experience: start where you are, become genuinely good at something, build evidence of your ability and apply before you feel ready.
“Do not reject yourself before anyone else has had the opportunity to consider you.”
For the teenager who once thought rejection meant the world had closed, Rakau’s life has become evidence of something different: sometimes the dream survives. Only the route changes.
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