Emma Sadlier | TechCabal

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Emma Sadlier

Emma Sadlier

Digital Law Company, Founder

In July 2025, the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Johannesburg handed down a groundbreaking judgment against Meta (the parent company of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook). It was a historic win for digital rights on the continent but particularly for Digital Law Company’s Emma Sadlier who took on the case after she began receiving desperate messages from schoolchildren who were being “doxxed” and victimised by anonymous accounts. These accounts were distributing explicit, non-consensual images—often filmed within schools—and linking them to the children’s real names and grades.

Sadlier founded Digital Law Company in 2013 and in 2025, firm secured a historic joint consent order, a ruling that forced Meta to shutter dozens of Instagram profiles and WhatsApp channels, unmask the metadata of over 60 offenders, and—in a world-first—establish a 24-month fast-track hotline specifically for The Digital Law Company to expedite the removal of child abuse material.

Beyond the courtroom, Sadleir released her third book, How Not to Mess Up Online, with her associate Rorke Wilson. The book is a guide to navigating the “prefrontal cortex traps” of AI deepfakes and sextortion. Her firm’s workshops have reached over half a million learners across Africa and the UK. This combination of “legal muscle” and preventative education has established Sadleir as the primary architect of digital safety on the continent.

In 2025, Sadlier solidified her position as a critical advocate for digital rights and freedoms that influence how millions of South Africans interact with the most popular social media and messaging platforms in the world.

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