Tech titans

Africa’s Top 50 digital champions 2022

In depth

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 Tuesday, 8 November 2022 15:26

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.

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Tech Champions

Appointed chief of the multinational in Africa just before the Covid-19 pandemic, 43-year-old Gajria has not been able to travel the continent the way he would have liked. In March, he made one of his first official trips to Lomé to mark, with the Togolese government, the landing of the Equiano submarine cable.

Tech Champions

‘We’ve done the heavy lifting,’ says Cassava Technologies’ Hardy Pemhiwa

For Liquid Intelligent Technologies (#167), the pandemic has produced yet another example of Africa leapfrogging. “We saw a five-times increase in data throughput,” says Hardy Pemhiwa, the chief executive of Liquid’s holding company, Cassava Technologies, recalling the huge demands suddenly placed on its vast fibre-optic network on the continent in 2020. Many companies were forced to digitalise to survive.

Tech Champions

Cybercrime: African business leaders need to change their outlooks and approaches

The deployment of digital technologies in Africa has grown dramatically over the past two decades. The internet penetration rate, which was less than 1% of the population in the 2000s according to the World Bank, has now reached 43.2% (Internet World Stats, 2021), including 25% of users connected every day.

Tech Champions

Start-ups: African champions in the consolidation era

Some twenty start-ups on the continent have reached the Series C financing stage. To maintain their growth rate, mergers and acquisitions are a choice option.