Buhle Phiwe Hlatshwayo grew up in Bergville, a town in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains in KwaZulu-Natal, where the possibilities available to girls rarely included diplomacy or negotiating international policy.
She describes it as a place where careers involving heads of state and global governance were difficult to imagine. A journalism degree from the University of Johannesburg began to change that.
So did a growing conviction that the distance between policy and people was a political choice. A chance encounter with former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan at a UN-led conference in Johannesburg left a lasting impression. When Annan asked why she was a journalist, Hlatshwayo said she wanted to be the voice of the voiceless. His response "You are going to do great things" helped convince her to look for opportunities beyond what she had known.
The Chevening Scholarship opened that door, taking her to Soas, University of London, where she studied international studies and diplomacy. Hlatshwayo later worked at the BBC before joining the African Union, where she spent seven years working on frameworks shaping Africa's digital future. Among her achievements was helping develop the AU's Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Africa's first continent-wide framework for AI governance. She also served as technical adviser on the African Continental Free Trade Area Digital Trade Protocol.
She is pursuing a PhD in international relations at the University of Pretoria, examining how Africa's regional trade architecture is being used to embed external digital governance scripts before African states can resist. As president of the Chevening Alumni Association of South Africa, she is working to widen access to scholarships.