Pretoria-raised, Africa-wide: a Geoinformatics honours grad turned service designer, who once spoke for eight million Scouts across the continent, plants spekboom by the hundred, and makes lovely things under her own label.
◈ from Pretoria High to the whole continent ◈
Some people talk about doing good. Kathleen just quietly gets on with it, at every level at once: designing services that delight customers by day, greening a province one spekboom at a time, carrying the voice of eight million Scouts, facilitating peace for World Scouting, and making lovely things by hand in between. This corner of the internet is here to say so.
A short, entirely admiring dossier.
For four years she chaired the Youth Advisors to the Africa Scout Committee (WOSM), representing eight million Scouts across Africa, and chaired the 9th Africa Scout Youth Forum in Nairobi. Her five keys to youth engagement: inspire, influence, innovate, involve, impact. She now sits on the Board of the Africa Scout Foundation.
Source: her forum address (video) ↗A World Scouting accredited Dialogues for Peace facilitator. She ran nationwide peace-dialogue training with young people across South Africa, then took the story to a global Messengers of Peace webinar in 2026.
Source: Scouts SA ↗She designed the National SCOUTS South Africa Alumni programme and its strategy from the ground up, everything from purple Shweshwe scarves to micro-volunteering, to keep thousands of former Scouts connected. Having built it, she's recently stepped back from running it day-to-day.
Source: Scouts SA ↗She holds the Baden-Powell Rover Award, the highest honour a Rover can earn in South Africa, earned in 2020 through her crew, the 45th Prometheus in Gauteng. Very few Rovers ever complete it.
Source: Scouts SA Wiki ↗IEMA-certified in carbon accounting, she dreamed up and led a Gauteng-wide climate project: 550 spekboom distributed to Scout groups with a care guide, "mother thickets" seeded at Arrowe Park and Gilwell, and roughly 5,000 young people reached.
Source: Scouts SA ↗Years of service out of the 45th Prometheus Rover Crew: Scribe of the Gauteng Rover Advisory Council (2016–17), and the quiet unglamorous good too, coordinating runs to deliver chronic medication and groceries to old-age homes and elderly families.
Source: Scouts SA Wiki ↗Her actual day job: Service Design Associate Manager at Accenture Song (after starting out in Accenture strategy and technology consulting). She designs services and business models that customers actually love.
Source: LinkedIn ↗A BSc and BSc Honours in Geoinformatics (GIS) from the University of Pretoria, with an exchange at Germany's Karlsruhe University. She's done real spatial-analysis work from Pretoria to Rhode Island.
Source: LinkedIn ↗She's a maker of things, sold through her own online store, Ember & Blue: crochet, jewellery, beading and a myriad of other thread-and-maker projects. When she isn't making, she's urban-gardening or doing graphic design and illustration.
Source: LinkedIn ↗She writes poetry at her blog, Kathleen in the Wild, "the poems that call to her from the edges of her universe." No surprise from someone who once chaired UP's Inklings writing society, directing plays and editing anthologies.
Source: her blog ↗Local to global, one level at a time: Tshwane → Gauteng → Africa → the world.
Once a Scout, always a Scout. Into the Rovers, delivering chronic meds and groceries to the elderly around Tshwane South.
Helping coordinate and support Rover crews across the whole province.
Ran daily English and cultural-education classes and weekend camps for schoolchildren. Scouting, on the other side of the world.
Four years representing eight million Scouts across Africa, culminating in chairing the 9th Africa Scout Youth Forum in Nairobi (Aug 2022), themed "Shaping Connected Futures", with 36 youth leaders from 25 countries.
The highest award a Rover can earn in South Africa. Very few ever finish it.
550 carbon-sponge plants across the province, a care guide, mother thickets, and ~5,000 young people reached. Backed by the Africa Scout Foundation.
From asking the Foundation for funding to helping steer it.
Accredited by World Scouting; ran nationwide peace-dialogue training, then spoke at a 2026 global Messengers of Peace webinar.
Architected the relaunched Scouts SA Alumni and its strategy, then handed over the day-to-day.
The day-job and the degrees behind all of the above.
Peer-reviewed by fellow Scouts. Carbon-negative.
“I was looking for something suitable for all our age groups, with a demonstrable ecological impact and that could continue long term and be sustainable.” — Kathleen, on why she started the spekboom project
This is a fan page, but the facts are real. Here's where they came from.