Africa spent 2026 turning up at the tables where AI’s rules get written rather than waiting to be handed them. Nigeria’s Bosun Tijani took a founding seat on the UN’s new AI for Good Global Commission in July. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame co-chairs it. Google opened its first applied AI commercialisation lab on the continent in Accra the same month, and Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies pushed ahead with a $720 million NVIDIA-backed compute buildout designed to stop African researchers from renting processing power abroad. Climate tech and AI infrastructure are now pulling in the kind of capital fintech used to monopolise, and behind every one of those headlines sits a specific person making the calls. Here are the twenty doing that in 2026, grouped by the kind of power they hold.
The Policymakers Setting the Rules
1. Bosun Tijani
Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy built N-ATLAS, Africa’s first government-backed open-source large language model, then expanded it into the continent-wide Atlas Network in July. He now sits as a founding member of the ITU’s AI for Good Global Commission, after Nigeria climbed 42 places to rank first in Africa on the 2026 Global Index on Responsible AI.
2. Paul Kagame
Rwanda’s president co-chairs the AI for Good Global Commission alongside Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, giving Africa one of the body’s most senior global governance seats. Kagame has spent years positioning Rwanda as a testbed for AI-friendly regulation, a bet that paid off when Kigali hosted the Global AI Summit on Africa in 2025.
3. Paula Ingabire
Rwanda’s Minister of ICT and Innovation sits on the newly formed Africa AI Council under Smart Africa, translating Kigali’s summit diplomacy into the domestic policy and infrastructure decisions that determine whether Rwanda’s AI ambitions survive contact with implementation.
4. Cina Lawson
Togo’s Minister of Digital Economy and Transformation is a Council member representing Francophone West Africa’s interests in continental AI governance, a region that has historically had less voice in an AI policy conversation dominated by Anglophone Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
5. Tatenda Mavetera
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Information, Communication Technology, Postal and Courier Services rounds out the Council’s ministerial bloc, bringing Southern African regulatory priorities into a body that also includes independent technologists and civil society voices.
6. Golestan (Sally) Radwan
Now Chief Digital Officer at the UN Environment Programme, Radwan built Egypt’s national AI strategy while advising the country’s ICT ministry and led two AI working groups spanning the African Union and the League of Arab States, making her one of the few figures with governance credibility across both African and Arab AI policy circles.
The Founders and Builders
7. Karim Beguir
Co-founder and CEO of InstaDeep, the Tunis-born decision-optimisation company that BioNTech acquired for roughly $682 million in 2023, still the largest AI exit to come out of the continent. Beguir sits on the Africa AI Council as one of its independent technologist members, and InstaDeep’s deep reinforcement learning work continues to anchor Tunisia’s claim to serious AI research capacity.
8. Silas Adekunle
Founder of Awarri, the Nigerian company building N-ATLAS in partnership with the federal government. Adekunle previously built Reach Robotics and sold its MekaMon gaming robot line to Apple in 2017 before turning to what he calls Africa’s most ambitious AI sovereignty play: training language models on Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Ibibio, and Nigerian Pidgin data that mainstream AI labs have largely ignored.
9. Strive Masiyiwa
The Zimbabwean telecoms billionaire behind Cassava Technologies is committing up to $720 million to build AI factories powered by NVIDIA GPUs across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco. Cassava’s parallel partnership with Sand Technologies is aimed at getting that compute into the hands of African businesses and researchers rather than leaving it purely as export infrastructure.
10. Pelonomi Moiloa
Co-founder and CEO of Lelapa AI, the Johannesburg company building small, efficient language models for African languages that global AI platforms have mostly skipped. Lelapa’s InkubaLM, developed with co-founder Jade Abbott, is billed as Africa’s first multilingual small language model, covering Swahili, Yoruba, isiXhosa, Hausa, and isiZulu.
11. Jade Abbott
Co-founder and CTO of Lelapa AI. Abbott headlined DataFestAfrica 2025 in Lagos and has become one of the continent’s most visible advocates for the argument that solving Africa’s language barrier is the precondition for every other useful application of AI on the continent, not a side project.
12. Kate Kallot
Founder and CEO of Amini, the Nairobi climate-tech company using satellite data and machine learning to close Africa’s environmental data gap for agriculture, insurance, and climate risk. A former NVIDIA emerging-markets executive, Kallot was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and has since moved Amini toward building its own local AI compute infrastructure rather than renting it abroad.
13. Iyinoluwa Aboyeji
Co-founder of Andela and former managing director of Flutterwave, Aboyeji now runs Future Africa, a venture platform that has become one of the more active early-stage backers of African AI and infrastructure startups, arguing that compute and connectivity are the oxygen every other AI ambition on the continent depends on ann also pushing learn2earn.
The Researchers and Standard-Setters
14. Moustapha Cissé
Founder and CEO of Kera Health Platforms and founding director of the African Master’s in Machine Intelligence at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the continent’s first postgraduate AI programme of its kind. Cissé built and led Google’s first African AI research centre in Accra before leaving in 2022 to focus on AI-driven healthcare in his native Senegal.
15. Vukosi Marivate
Professor and ABSA-UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria, and an Africa AI Council member. Marivate co-founded Lelapa AI, the Masakhane Research Foundation for African NLP, and Deep Learning Indaba, the annual gathering that has become the closest thing the continent has to a unifying AI research community.
16. Chenai Chair
Director of the Masakhane African Languages Hub, which has grown from a grassroots research collective into one of the most cited references for natural language processing work on African languages, feeding directly into products like Lelapa’s InkubaLM and Awarri’s N-ATLAS.
17. Seydina Moussa Ndiaye
A Senegalese AI researcher with a PhD in computer science and an outspoken critic of what he calls digital colonisation, Ndiaye pushes for AI systems that keep African data sovereignty and local context central, rather than treating the continent as a downstream market for models trained elsewhere.
The Institutional Power Brokers
18. Paulin Basinga
Director for Africa at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and an Africa AI Council independent member, Basinga controls a philanthropic capital pipeline that has quietly become one of the larger funders of AI-adjacent health and agriculture work across the continent.
19. Akua Gyekye
Senior Director and Head of Government Affairs for Africa at Microsoft, Gyekye sits at the intersection of Big Tech’s African AI investment and the continental policy bodies, including the Africa AI Council, that are trying to set terms for how that investment gets deployed.
20. Yasser Shaker
CEO of Orange Middle East and Africa, one of the continent’s largest telecom operators and a Council member whose infrastructure decisions, from data centres to connectivity, shape how much AI compute actually reaches African users rather than staying theoretical.
What This List Actually Signals
Half the names above did not exist on an AI power list two years ago, which says something about how fast the ground has shifted. The Africa AI Council alone accounts for roughly a third of this list, evidence that the continent’s AI conversation has consolidated around a handful of formal institutions rather than staying scattered across individual startups and conferences. The bigger tension sitting underneath all twenty names is the one Masiyiwa’s AI factories and Cissé’s Google-era compute complaints both point at: policy seats and research credibility mean less if the GPUs to act on them stay concentrated in a handful of data centres. Watch which of these twenty spend 2026 converting influence into infrastructure people can actually use.
