Smart Africa Group

Edwin Bruno is a Tanzanian entrepreneur and transformational leader passionate about Technology, Creative Marketing & Investment. He is the CVO & CEO of Smart Africa Group (SAG), an innovation and digital consulting company with a mission to build integrated platforms that connect people and organizations to unlock infinite possibilities in Africa and beyond.

Edwin studied Private Equity and Venture Capital at Harvard Business School, which propelled him to think as an investor and build partnerships skewed to future investment readiness.

He also attained his Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering at St. Joseph College of Engineering while majoring in Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics for his Advanced level Secondary school education. Growing up, he had the ambition of becoming an engineer, although his mother wanted him to be a pilot.

In his second year of software engineering studies, Edwin started his entrepreneurship journey, inspired by Salesforce’s mission to drive a cloud computing journey, moving from a hardware/software culture; which was super expensive, inefficient, and not scalable. He believed in Salesforce’s mission at that time, and he knew that was the future of tech.

“I am a curious and futuristic-driven individual. I believe in thinking globally while acting locally. Looking at Tanzania’s tech space and market 15 years ago, I wanted to bridge the gap in tech-related solutions by making them affordable, efficient, and scalable anywhere, anytime. Through my practical training in university, I showcased value for the company I volunteered by digitalizing their services, from domain & hosting, to personalizing their emails to creating a website to increase their business and communications reach. I showed them why it was important for a company to have global reach even though they were locally based.”

Fast forward, Edwin started a company focused on technology and Creative Marketing. He identified a need to elevate the conveying of messages through digitally-driven means as traditional ways kept declining. The aim was to expand further and expose the Tanzanian market through digital communication, which drove him to start, Smart Codes in 2010 as a technology and creative digital marketing agency.

This further compelled Edwin’s thoughts about the additional value he could provide his business partners while helping them understand their consumer needs better. He wanted the company to be more than just an agency, which prompted the question, “How can the company connect people and organizations with a mission to solve African challenges”?