Tech Champions

Africa’s Top 50 digital champions: 30 leaders at start-ups, telcos and tech giants

In depth

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

By Julien Clémençot

Posted on Tuesday, 26 April 2022 02:05, updated on Tuesday, 8 November 2022 15:25

Tech rankings © Arrangement by The Africa Report: Jemal Countess/Getty via AFP ; Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty ; Pascal Perich pour JA ; Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty ; Ehab Farouk/REUTERS ; Francois Grivelet for The Africa Report.

They run Chipper Cash, Opay, Wave, TradeDepot, Andela, MTN, Vodacom, Orange, Google, Amazon, Terraco and Huawei. The African tech industry’s 30 most important bosses feature in our exclusive ranking.

This is part 2 of an 11-part series.

Our 2022 tech champions ranking shows the growth of the sector, which was boosted by the health crisis. After a record year for fundraising – $5bn – African start-ups are continuing with their momentum in 2022, as $1.8bn was raised during the first quarter.

Fintechs were again among the most prominent start-ups over the last year as a whole, particularly in Nigeria, whose huge market is a major asset.

Club of unicorns

.no-script-hidden { display: none }

Your browser could not fetch this story

If you are reading this message your browser has Javascript disabled. Please enable Javascript in order to access to this story.

Tech titans

Africa’s Top 50 digital champions 2022

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.

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.