Mpho Mpofu
Mpho Mpofu is qualitative research and consumer insights specialist based in Johannesburg, working across African and global markets.
November 11 @ 1:40 pm – 2:00 pm GMT
This live webinar is part of The Qualitative Insights Summit 2026:
Mpho Mpofu from Masutane on why AI misreads African consumers — a provenance test and framework for documenting unwritten methods.
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A model can only learn from what somebody wrote down. African qualitative practice has largely gone unwritten, so when a global model is asked about the African consumer it answers from frameworks written elsewhere. The answer reads as authoritative and a client has no way of telling that it is not.
The session draws on 31 in-depth interviews with qualitative researchers across the continent, done for The Qual African. Over and over they described methods they use every week and have never written down anywhere. Working with an interpreter who is doing much more than translating. Reading a silence in a group and knowing what to do with it. Real technique, held in people’s heads and nowhere else.
Documentation is the urgent work now. The session covers how to do it inside live project work, without turning it into a separate writing job that never happens. It also covers where AI does earn its place in African fieldwork, because it does.
Key Takeaways:
- A provenance test for AI output about African consumers, to run before it reaches a client.
- How to document method inside live project work, and where to publish it without academic access.
- Where AI helps in African fieldwork and where it does damage.
- How to make the documentation gap a commercial argument in a client conversation.