One of the best things about being at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos is you never know who you’ll bump into. Sometimes, as Alec Hogg shares here, a really special someone like the “done great” daughter of a good friend. Pretoria lass Bryonie Guthrie is managing the Ice Village at Davos 2023 – and in this interview explains what she is doing here; life as a WEF staffer; how she deals with misguided critics of her employer; and, even though her role is global, how she is doing her part in helping her homeland tackle its toughest biggest challenges (Hint: if you thought education was expensive, try ignorance).
Bryonie Guthrie’s affiliation to WEF
I went to the good old University of Pretoria, studied politics and international relations there. I did a master’s as well in international relations when I was in Hong Kong. That sort of track through my career is how I ended up here. So, four years at South Africa’s consulate in Hong Kong, and then in private equity for a brief stint. I’ve been over here for three years now, and I do public sector engagement, which is basically what got me over here.
The Ice Village at WEF
Having come here for many years, there are a lot of people who want to come to Davos. We cannot always accommodate all the people who want to come to the main venue. So we have our affiliate programme, which is run by the forum, and a lot of our strategic partner companies in the Ice Village. This is normally an ice hockey rink, and we have set up our igloos all through here, which is where we are going to host affiliate sessions. My team has the strategic intelligence dome behind us. We will be hosting sessions there all week.
What the strategic intelligence team does at WEF
We are actually the forum’s largest community in some ways because we run a platform that is available to anyone in the world. It is a global public good. Anyone in the world can sign up with a simple email address and we use that platform to get a lot of the information, the knowledge, the work that we’re doing in the forum out to a broader public audience. And as part of that, we are running sessions with various communities of the forum here for the week.
The platform is run by the forum, but we get experts to come and talk to us or write about the topics we cover. We cover about 285 topics, a lot of which are really complex global issues. Everything from A.I. to blockchain to sustainable development of climate change. And we use our experts – we have a huge network of experts at the forum – to write on these topics for an interested but non-expert audience.
Who can access the platform
Anyone can access it and learn about pretty much anything of importance in the world right now. Blockchain, climate change, artificial intelligence. We have country maps on multiple different economies. We have maps on 16 different industries which include the oil and gas industry, the mining industry, the automotive industry, and tourism. Anyone can sign up, and our experts do not come from the private sector. We aim for academia or international organisations which write the content, and we change them every couple of years so that we’re not stuck in one objective.
Working with South Africa
My job with strategic intelligence is public sector engagements. South Africa is still my home. We started a project at the beginning of last year where we decided to take the platform to govern the whole of the public sector in South Africa. The platform is freely available, but then we have a membership feature that is paid by our private sector partners. We provided these features, including the ability to attend virtual events, as well as the annual meeting, for the first time ever.
WEF on livestream
We run over 500 or 600 sessions so we’ve had to choose specific ones. All of the South African government has the option to be a digital member; you can sign up for these sessions that we’re running for this live-streamed audience. I don’t know how many there are exactly, but they’re happening throughout Davos and you can actually sign in through Top Link and watch this.
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