Tech titans

Africa’s Top 50 digital champions 2022

This article is part of the dossier: Top 50 tech champions

By Jeune Afrique, The Africa Report
Posted on Monday, 25 April 2022 17:43, updated on Wednesday, 27 April 2022 16:17

For the second year in a row, The Africa Report and Jeune Afrique are publishing an exclusive ranking of the 50 people that are leading the continent's digital revolution. In order to give more visibility to these tech champions, we decided to shake things up by dividing our ranking into three parts.

This is part 1 of an 11-part series.

The first part includes 30 names, a mix of start-up and corporate executives taken from a list of 112 business leaders that the the editorial team compiled. All of them have made news over the past 12 months (from 1 March 2021 to 11 April 2022).

They have either raised funds, seen the value of their start-ups rise, developed their business models, invested in new markets, financed projects, swallowed up competitors or sold their companies.

On the basis of this information, The Africa Report and Jeune Afrique compiled this list, which aims to reflect the tech sector’s evolution.

The number of investors on the continent that specialise in financing the digital sector is increasing each year. We have selected 10 investors and seed-fund operators that were active over the 2021-2022 period, taking into account the number of operations, the size of their funds, the type of the projects financed and the management teams.

Finally, because nothing would be possible without them, we have established a ranking of 10 ‘trend setters’, a broad category that includes regulators, public agency bosses, incubators, lobbyists and influencers.

In total, there were 216 names in our database for these three selections. The editors then studied each profile to compile the 2022 ranking of our top 50 digital champions.

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