Joanna Bischel

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Joanna Bischel

Joanna Bischel

Kasha, Founder & CEO

When Joanna Bischel launched Kasha in 2016 with co-founder Amanda Arch, there were very few African startups that could be categorised as “femtech” solutions, a subset of the healthtech market optimised for women and projected to reach $97 billion by 2030. Under Bischel’s leadership, Kasha has spread its reach in East and Southern Africa and expanded its health, wellness, and pharmaceutical products to reach underserved last-mile users, especially women in low-income communities, with genuine healthcare, beauty products, pharmaceuticals, and other household goods.

In a region where up to 22.6% of fake or substandard medicines plague the market, and women’s reproductive care and education are still regarded as taboo topics, Kasha’s solution offers a critical service that addresses both access and cost for a bulk of its customers. It works with distributors and partners to ensure products are of high quality and adopts e-commerce features such as shortcodes that ensure buyers outside urban areas still have access. Critically, Kasha works with ministries and developmental organisations to drive reproductive healthcare access in the markets where it operates.

In 2025, the company launched operations in South Africa, fueled by a $21 million funding round led by Knife Capital, a pan-African venture capital firm based in South Africa. This solidified Kasha’s position not merely as an e-commerce platform, but as a critical hybrid (online and offline) distribution system designed to overcome Africa’s most severe healthcare access gaps and to address a grossly underserved demographic. Kasha also raised funding from Boehringer Ingelheim’s Social Engagement Fund in 2025, which, unlike venture capital, will provide patient financing that’ll allow Kasha to prioritise long-term health outcomes over quick exits.

Following its entry into South Africa, the company is taking on West Africa next.

In 2025, Bichsel continues to drive Kasha’s ambition to become a pan-African source of genuine healthcare and pharmaceuticals, especially for women in underserved communities.

How We Selected

Building anything of value is hard anywhere in the world. In Africa, it is harder. The Builders’ List recognises people doing it anyway.

Beyond shipping products, Africa’s technology ecosystem constantly navigates unreliable power, fragmented logistics, weak public infrastructure, and regulatory uncertainty—often all at once. Progress is rarely linear, and success is usually hard-won.

Founders alone do not make the industry. It is sustained by people doing a variety of work, some of it invisible but critical to the industry’s success. To recognise them, TechCabal is launching The Builders’ List: an annual index of the most consequential people shaping Africa’s technology ecosystem in the calendar year. It is a record of who’s building, and what their work reveals about the system they are building within.

For the inaugural edition, our selected Builders are grouped across five categories:

Operators: Those who make systems work at scale.
Innovators: Those creating new products, models, or technical possibilities.
Enablers: The individuals and institutions lowering the cost of building for others.
Organisers: Those connecting people, capital, and opportunity.
Keepers: The stewards of trust, continuity, and institutional memory.

Together, these roles offer a more complete map of how the ecosystem functions.

The Builders’ List is an editorial project led by the TechCabal newsroom, informed by independent reporting and conversations with founders, operators, investors, policymakers, and long-time ecosystem observers across the continent and the diaspora.

Our selections were based on our assessment of what materially changed within the calendar year, from infrastructure to policy or scale, rather than reputation or momentum alone. Where work is still emerging, progress was evaluated within the realities of the sector, market, and country in which it occurred.

Candidates were assessed comparatively and contextually. Starting from over 600 deeply researched names spanning all 54 African countries, we weighed outcomes against each builder’s operating environment—geography, regulation, capital access, impact and institutional maturity. Context that applies in Lagos doesn’t automatically translate to Kigali or Dakar.

Final decisions were made through editorial review. While external perspectives informed our reporting, the list reflects TechCabal’s independent editorial judgment.

This process, as our first, has been a critical learning curve. It reminded us that Africa’s technology ecosystem is far broader than funding headlines suggest—spanning hardware engineers in Cairo, beekeepers in rural Kenya, ministers rewiring infrastructure, and documentarians building institutional memory.

We learned that in 2025, the builders who matter most are no longer defined by capital raised or growth velocity, but by what they’ve made durable. This list revealed an ecosystem maturing past obsessions with scale and spectacle, toward the quieter work of building things that last—profitable businesses, regulatory frameworks, talent pipelines, and infrastructure others can build on.

The Builders’ List will return in 2026, and the patterns will shift. But the commitment remains: to document not just who is building, but what their work reveals about the system taking shape.

Africa’s technology ecosystem is firmly in its endurance era

Temitayo Jaiyeola, Senior Reporter and Lead Curator, The Builders’ List