Adedeji Owonibi

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Adedeji Owonibi

Adedeji Owonibi

Adedeji Owonibi, cNGN

In 2025, Adedeji Owonibi stood out for turning complex Web3 ideas into a regulated, working infrastructure across humanitarian aid, stablecoin, and financial compliance in Nigeria.

As founder and COO of Convexity, Owoni led the scaling of Convexity Humanitarian Aid Transfer Solution (CHATS), a blockchain-based cash and voucher assistance (CVA) distribution platform, which funded impact in Nigerian communities. In Makoko, a community in Lagos, CHATS was used to pay local workers and volunteer teachers directly and distribute food to elderly women and widows. Every payment, from donor to beneficiary, was recorded on the blockchain, giving non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and donors full visibility into how funds were used. In a sector plagued by leakage and weak reporting, CHATS showed that transparent, tech-enabled aid delivery can work at the last mile.

Beyond humanitarian tech, Owonibi played a central role in launching cNGN, a government-regulated naira-backed stablecoin—digital currency pegged 1:1 to a local currency—where he is Director of Policy and Strategy. In February 2025, cNGN went live under the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversight, listed on provisionally licenced crypto exchanges like Quidax and Busha, and deployed across multiple blockchains. Owonibi led its compliance design—bank custody of reserves, audited smart contracts, monthly reserve attestations, and strict Know Your Business (KYB) controls for exchange partners—helping move stablecoins in Nigeria from theory to trusted financial infrastructure. As of December 2025, cNGN had over 1 billion tokens in circulation.

At A&D Forensics, where he is a senior partner, Owonibi also led multi-day crypto compliance trainings for commercial banks, Sterling Bank and First Bank, equipping their staff with knowledge to manage crypto-related risks in line with global standards.

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