Solving world hunger with data

In a recent episode of the First Person podcast we met with Magan Naidoo, Chief Data Office of the World Food Council. Magan told us of his pride in building a future-proof data organization to help solve world hunger.

He told us he started out in software engineering but transferred into data when his bosses recognised his talent for connecting technology to business problems. He described his desire to understand and solve problems from first principles rather than just do tasks on request.

You can view our interview here, listen to it here, or watch in the box below:   

First principles, solving problems

Magan told us what brought him to Chief Data Officer roles. In his view it stems from his mindset.

“I’m curious. I like learning and growing and exploring,” he told us. “I always like to learn and grow and ask lots of questions.”

This instinct led him first into IT.

“I always liked science and technology,” Magan said.”Growing up I wanted to be a scientist. Breaking new boundaries, pushing the frontier and being at the cutting edge of things. I always wanted to be part of something like that.”

Magan told us that in his view data, and in particular AI, fulfil this need in him. “It’s core to everything going on in the world. All the shiny front end things in technology, at the root of it is data” he said. “If you want to do something, you’ve got to get those fundamentals right.”

“If you’re trying to solve a problem, get the basics right, everything will follow.” (See also: How to leverage tech success for good.)

The path to data

Magan told us that his instincts and curiosity paved his way to the role he inhabits today. “A lot of my formative career was in software development, building systems,” he explained. “I did a lot of the backend, database, build, and data components. Perhaps not in the way people think of data today, but data governance, data quality, data privacy.”

He might still be doing this if his bosses didn’t recognize his strength: mapping business need to technical fundamentals. They asked him to move to the US and lead a major data project. Accepting wasn’t a simple decision.

“It was a pivotal and scary moment,” Magan explained. “I saw myself as a technology specialist. There’s an opportunity to try something new, leading a data team. What if this doesn’t work out and I derail my career because now I’ve gotten so far away from my core?” In the end Magan told us his curiosity and desire to be at the centre of things closed the deal. “In the top three reasons of why big projects fail is one is data. I like the big picture. I like to know how the building blocks come together so that I can enable the outcome,” Magan told us. “I took the risk and it paid dividends because ever since that moment on I’ve been in the data space.”

Doing good with data

Magan was offered the chance of a lifetime: to be the Chief Data Officer of the World Food Council. And this was not an offer he had to consider for long.

“It’s a chance to take my collective knowledge and experience, and do good in the world,” he told us.

“I don’t think there’s anything bigger than that. Global scale, global impact. Taking the skills of data and AI and impacting the world in a positive way.”

We asked Magan what is his proudest achievement. Happily for him he told us it is in his current role.

“We’re building out a future fit modern data estate,” Magain said. “Reusability, enterprise thinking, low cost, high speed. It is the foundation for everything that needs to follow. It set us up for success. We operate in many countries around and what we’ve built is completely portable and reusable with just minimal customization for any local country context.”

The result of that work? Supporting the work of the World Food Council in relieving hunger, and doing so at scale.

“It set us up for AI ambitions. By having the strong data foundation that we’ve built over the last many years we’ve already started to execute on our AI ambitions and can scale.”

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