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The Club of Rome Podcast

The Club of Rome Podcast

Von: The Club of Rome
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Thought leaders and changemakers explore the mindshifts and policy solutions needed to transform the complex challenges facing humanity and the planet today.Copyright 2022 All rights reserved. Politik & Regierungen Wissenschaft
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  • Africa's AI crossroads with Yemi Keri

    Africa's AI crossroads with Yemi Keri
    Aug 28 2026
    While the world debates artificial intelligence's implications for economies and everyday life, one question is too often overlooked: what does the AI revolution mean for Africa? In this episode, Till Kellerhoff, director for content and programmes at the Club of Rome, speaks with Yemi Keri, a technology executive, impact investor and ecosystem builder and member of the Club of Rome with over two decades of leadership experience across Africa's public and private sectors. As co-founder of Rising Tide Africa and president of the African Business Angel Network, Yemi brings a distinctive lens on inclusive capital and early-stage innovation. She sets out an optimistic case for AI as a "development equaliser" that could transform agriculture, healthcare and education across the continent, while pressing for African data sovereignty, homegrown cloud infrastructure and greater investment in local talent. The conversation also turns to the risks of a new extractive era built on data rather than raw materials, the energy demands of AI infrastructure, and why more women need a seat at the table in building the technology's future. Is this Africa's chance to leapfrog towards a more ethical and sustainable AI revolution, or do we risk repeating old patterns of inequality in new forms? Transcript Till: While everyone currently talks about artificial intelligence and its implications for our work, our economies and our lives, one topic that is often underexplored is the implications of the AI revolution for African countries and Africa's digital transformation. And one of the tech leaders driving this transformation is Yemi Keri. Yemi is a technology executive, impact investor and ecosystem builder with over two decades of leadership experience across the public and private sectors in Africa. She's the co-founder of Rising Tide Africa, a women-focused angel investment network and the president of the African Business Angel Network, where she champions inclusive capital and supports the growth of early-stage ventures across the continent. I'm Till Kellerhoff, director for Content and Programs at the Club of Rome and in this episode, we explore Yemi's take on what an AI-positive future could look like in Africa. Yemi paints a particularly optimistic picture of the future of AI in Africa and its possibilities to revolutionise agriculture, healthcare and innovation. In this episode, we'll hear from her based on the experiences in Africa's innovation system, then unpack some of the other views on AI's risks and challenges. Till: Hi, Yemi. Welcome. Pleasure to have you on the Club of Rome Podcast. From where are you calling today? Yemi: Today I'm speaking to you from the rainy season of Lagos. So if you listen behind me, you would hear traffic. Till: We want to talk about this big topic of AI today and a question that gets rarely asked, but is maybe good to be asked from the perspective of the Club of Rome that wants to ask fundamental questions. What do we need AI for? What is AI for from your perspective? Why do we need it? Yemi: I facilitate at a business school and I tell them that it's going to become a utility, like we have electricity, in the long run. We need AI where it helps us solve real consistent problems, issues like healthcare access, agricultural productivity. Can AI help a farmer increase their yields? Can it help a teacher reach 100 students or 400 students instead of maybe 20? So if AI helps us solve all of these kind of problems, then it becomes a transformational, tool or platform or enabler. Till: So Yemi, if we look at concrete examples on the ground where AI is already useful today and will be useful in the future, what would that be from your perspective? Yemi: I mean, there are different variants of things that are happening. Particularly for when we are looking at the impact on climate change in itself on smallholder farmers. In the agri-sector, a lot of projects are using AI to ensure that information gets to the farmers at the, you know, the smallholder farmers because I mean, they grow our crops and we are predominantly an agri-economy. And so, a lot of AI is being utilised and models are being built so that they help the farmers, the smallholder farmers, you know, with predictive crop, the soil testing, everything like that. The other one I know is really healthcare. Diagnosis of diseases, or symptoms as the medical people call it. It's more affordable to people that, in the rural areas, would have to transport themselves to a hospital to be able to get that done. And so if you're looking at the impact on the society, a lot is being done and developed that is supporting and helping the society to grow. Till: And you described AI as a utility, similar to electricity and one can also describe it as a tool. And I think what we see in the development of general, in the last decades and hundreds of years, is that tools can be used both for, let's say, good and evil, right? Tools are...
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    23 Min.
  • From the ground up: Lessons in locally-led solutions with Runa Khan

    From the ground up: Lessons in locally-led solutions with Runa Khan
    Jun 26 2026

    What does it take to reach the world's most marginalised communities - not just with aid, but with dignity? In this episode of the Club of Rome Podcast, host Nolita Mvunelo speaks with Runa Khan, member of the Club of Rome and founder of Friendship, an international social purpose organisation that has been working on the river islands and coastal chars of Bangladesh since 2002. In 2025, Friendship won the Earthshot Prize in the Fix Our Climate category.

    Runa grew up in a privileged "glass bubble" in Bangladesh, shielded from the realities of deep poverty. An encounter with communities on the nomadic islands of the Brahmaputra river sparked a lifelong commitment to justice and equity. Her father's words stayed with her: "You are only as rich as what you can do without."

    In this conversation, Runa and Nolita explore what it means to build truly holistic, locally-led solutions. Runa explains the importance of the right interventions at the right time - not standardised programmes designed elsewhere - and why Friendship doesn't just go the last mile, it goes the last metre. They discuss the structural barriers that keep aid from reaching the most vulnerable, the tension between donor-led agendas and community-defined needs, and why quality and beauty matter even – indeed especially - in the most resource-scarce contexts.
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    22 Min.
  • Law and the future of capitalism with Katharina Pistor

    Law and the future of capitalism with Katharina Pistor
    May 29 2026
    What if the key to transforming capitalism lies in the law? In this episode, we speak with Katharina Pistor, Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University, member of the Club of Rome and author of The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, about the legal foundations that underpin our economic system, and how they might be reimagined. Katharina argues that capitalism is not a free market but a "market economy on legal steroids," shaped and sustained by legal structures that govern everything from corporations and property rights to data ownership and financial markets. She explores how tools such as limited liability, asset partitioning and private contract law have enabled the concentration of wealth - and how those same tools could be repurposed to drive systemic change. From the enclosure of the commons to the rise of the data oligarchs and the Alaska Permanent Fund, this is a wide-ranging conversation about the unwritten rules of our economy and the potential for transformation. Transcript Till: Welcome, Katharina. Great to have you on the show. Katharina: Thank you so much for having me. Till: We have often on this podcast talked about our polycrisis, overlapping different crises, eroding social capital, polarisation, of course, our ecological crisis. And in all of the debates, we often talk about economics, politics, but rarely about law. You now write in your new book that seeking change through law does not make transformative change easier, but arguably it makes it more likely. Why is that the case? Why should we talk more about law when we talk about change and transformation? Katharina: So I think before we think about change and transformation, we have to do a thorough diagnostic of the system. And my diagnostic of the system, now people might disagree, but my diagnostic of the system is that capitalism is a system that is effectively a legal system, a legal regime. Capital is coded in law, as I have argued in my previous book from 2019, "The Code of Capital," and in the new book, "The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It," I'm basically extending the analysis to the system as such. And I'm arguing that the system is a legal regime. It is based on law. It is maintained by law. It's entrenched in law. And because of this, we have to seek change through law rather than from outside of the legal system. Till: What I was wondering when, when, when reading the book and, and, and listening to you, is law kind of then the foundation as you see it of then, the capitalist system? Or is it following logics of capitalism and kind of aligning with those logics to an extent? So is it preceding or following? Katharina: Yes. Well, that's a really interesting question. So I think from a Marxist perspective, you would say it follows, because it's all about the material conditions that create the conditions for law to evolve in a particular way. Also, Evgeny Pashukanis, one of the leading socialist legal theorists of the early 20th century, he argued that law takes a particular form in capitalism. He might even go as far as saying law is always necessarily capitalist. That I think would go a little too far. So in my mind, it's very difficult to do the chicken and egg analysis here because we have a long trajectory of legal institutions. Private law, the law of contracts and property, even business organisations, you can trace back all the way to Roman times. Prior to the rise of the nation state, people used legal arrangements, and so the question is then what is really law? And I think law, in my mind, is when you start formalising the norms and institutions that govern social and economic relations. So once you formalise them, you abstract them, and then once you also add the capacity of a state or authority to back these contracts and property rights through enforcement mechanism, then you have something like a legal system. That's what I would call a legal system. And I think for capital and capitalism, that was really critical because capitalism is not just about having economic transaction within your small little community, it's about scale. And scaling requires more complex, more abstract, more formal systems of ordering, of social ordering, and you may not want to call this law what I would call that law. So in that sense, the rise of the nation state, the scalability of socioeconomic relations, and their enforceability by mobilising the consolidated means of coercion is absolutely critical for capitalism. So if you push me, I would say that comes first, but in fact, of course, it comes in relation with. It is sort of, it's a correlation that it has to happen at the same time, but it doesn't... It's a sine qua non. Without this, it will not happen. Till: And what I found interesting in that context when you spoke ...
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    26 Min.
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