About Walter Kwami

I'm Walter Kwami — an information technologist with over 30 years of experience designing, deploying, and operating production information systems across healthcare, finance, construction, and the public sector. I currently work in the Department of Information Technology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

My work focuses on how complex systems behave when theory meets reality: scale, security, reliability, latency, cost, and the human factors that sit beneath all of them. Having spent much of my career in well-resourced environments, I'm particularly interested in how technology must be engineered — not merely adopted — when applied in resource-limited contexts, especially in Ghana.

Technology doesn't fail in the lab. It fails in the field — under budget pressure, unreliable infrastructure, and the weight of decisions made by people who weren't in the room when the system was designed.

Beyond enterprise IT, I've applied remote sensing, UAVs, and geospatial analysis to environmental monitoring — including a pilot project with the Ghana Forestry Commission that surfaced the operational realities of illegal logging in a protected forest reserve. That work reinforced something I'd long believed: the most important insights rarely come from the data alone. They come from understanding the environment the data lives in.

I write from a practitioner's perspective — interested in systems that hold up under real conditions, the trade-offs that actually matter, and the role technology can play as infrastructure for public good. Not every post will be technical. Some will be observational. But all of it comes from time spent in the work, not at a distance from it.

Based in Boston. Connected to Accra. Writing at the intersection of systems, people, and the real world they operate in.