Paul Mandele’s love for gadgets sparked a career in building practical, home‑grown tech solutions. As head of IT at Smart Foundry, he is turning bold ideas into products, drawing on a journey that spans 3D printing for education, an SMS tool protecting farmers and a lifelong passion for teaching.
From the moment Paul Mandele could experiment with a gadget, he was hooked. “I was the child who would take things apart just to see how they worked,” he recalls with a smile. That early fascination with electronics led him to a technical high school, where he immersed himself in engineering basics before pursuing a diploma in computer science. Along the way, he taught himself to code in internet cafés, often building websites late into the night. “Those cafés became my first classroom,” he says. “I would pay for one hour and stay as long as the owner allowed, just to keep learning.”
That curiosity quickly grew into something more ambitious. Before long, Paul was co‑founding a startup that built 3D printers entirely from scrap materials. The goal was to create affordable educational teaching aids, but the work soon expanded into healthcare applications, including prosthetics and functional microscopes. “We wanted to prove that innovation could happen here, with what we already had,” he explains. “You did not need expensive imports to solve local problems.”
The entrepreneurial streak did not stop there. Paul moved into agri‑tech, initially creating a platform to link farmers with markets. But after discovering the widespread problem of counterfeit farming inputs, he pivoted. The team developed a simple SMS‑based validation system that allowed farmers to confirm the authenticity of seeds and fertilisers before purchase. “It was technology meeting a real, everyday problem,” he says. “Sometimes innovation is about responding to what people truly need in the moment.”
That solution eventually caught the attention of the Tanzanian government, which adopted it for nationwide use through the national telecommunications corporation. Today it has been running for more than seven years, evolving into a comprehensive agricultural database. “It is gratifying to know something you built is still making a difference, even when you are no longer the one running it every day,” Paul says.
With the government now running his agri‑tech solution, Paul found himself ready for a new challenge. He joined Smart Codes as a contractor, helping Vodacom Tanzania in its digital transformation by developing value‑added services. “It was a chance to work at scale and see how large organisations approach innovation,” he says.
Grounding creativity in practicality
His work caught the attention of Smart Foundry, a venture studio under Smart Codes that builds, tests and scales new digital products and startups. For Paul, it was a natural fit. “Smart Foundry is about taking ideas from concept to reality, then helping them grow into sustainable ventures,” he explains. “That has been my entire career in a nutshell.” Today, he heads the subsidiary, overseeing everything from ideation to product development and scaling. His team of about a dozen includes engineers, marketers and product managers, all working to bring bold ideas to life.
Paul leads with a mix of curiosity, adaptability and a willingness to let go of what no longer works. “In technology, holding on to an outdated idea can be just as risky as having no idea at all,” he says. He encourages his team to keep learning, but also to unlearn. This means paying close attention to how customer behaviour is changing and being ready to scrap features that no longer add value. “If a product is not solving a real problem today, it does not matter how brilliant it was yesterday,” he explains.
His leadership style is rooted in empowerment. He prefers to give his team ownership of their projects, trusting them to experiment and make informed decisions. “You cannot innovate in an environment where people are afraid to try,” he says. At the same time, he insists on grounding creativity in practicality, ensuring every idea can be implemented within the resources available. “Good innovation is not just about imagination, it is about execution,” he adds.
Ask Paul about artificial intelligence and you get a measured, forward‑looking response. “AI is here to stay. It will not take away all our jobs, but it will change how we work,” he says. He believes Africa must not limit itself to simply consuming AI tools built elsewhere. Instead, the continent should be developing its own solutions, tailored to its unique challenges and realities. “If we are only consumers, we inherit other people’s biases and miss the chance to create our own wealth,” he explains.
He has seen first‑hand the industrial potential of AI through a postgraduate programme with General Electric and the African Leadership University, where the focus was on automation, manufacturing and other sectors often overlooked in Africa’s tech conversations. “We tend to think of AI as chatbots and image generators, but the world is using it to run factories, optimise logistics and manage infrastructure,” he says. “We need to think beyond the consumer side.”
A guiding role
On cybersecurity, Paul stresses that the biggest threat often lies within. “The human element is our weakest link,” he says. He calls for stronger education around digital security, not just for IT teams but across entire organisations. Building local cybersecurity tools is another priority in his view. “We cannot depend entirely on solutions designed for other markets. Our threats are different, our context is different,” he adds.
Paul’s curiosity does not clock out at the end of the workday. He still experiments with gadgets, tinkering with hardware and testing new tools in his spare time. “I like to see how things fit together, whether it is a new sensor or a prototype I am building at home,” he says.
Adventure fuels his creativity too. He enjoys long drives to unfamiliar places, often returning with fresh ideas sparked by what he has seen along the way. That same curiosity feeds his passion for teaching.
From the early days of informal coding circles in college to mentoring young founders at tech hubs, he has always found himself in the role of a guide. “You learn twice when you teach,” he says. “It sharpens your thinking and keeps you humble.”
Whether he is guiding a product from concept to launch, helping a farmer verify their seeds via SMS, or showing a young developer how to debug a stubborn bit of code, he approaches it with the same quiet determination. As he puts it, “Technology is not the point. What matters is the change it makes in someone’s day.”
