Bosun Tijani

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Bosun Tijani

Dr. Bosun Tijani

Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Nigeria

Dr. Bosun Tijani is Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, a role in which he emerged in 2025 as one of Africa’s most visible technology policymakers. His year was defined by the rapid scaling of Nigeria’s digital talent pipeline and growing global recognition for his leadership on artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure.

In August 2025, Tijani was named to TIME Magazine’s TIME100 AI list, joining global technology leaders such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman. The citation highlighted his ability to bring a startup mindset into government and his push to build an inclusive AI ecosystem for the Global South. In June, he was elected Vice Chair of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Council, strengthening Nigeria’s influence in global digital policy.

At home, Tijani oversaw major milestones in the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme, the world’s largest technical training initiative. By December 2025, more than 300,000 Nigerians had completed training, with over 16,000 securing direct employment. The programme activated 201 learning centres nationwide and attracted more than ₦6.45 billion ($4.45 million) in private-sector funding.

He also advanced Nigeria’s digital infrastructure agenda, unveiling a World Bank–backed plan to roll out 90,000km of fibre-optic cable, approving 4,000 rural telecom towers, and implementing the country’s National AI Strategy with the launch of AI hubs in a few states. Alongside these efforts, Tijani has driven government digitalisation through platforms such as the Nigerian Data Exchange and ongoing civil service upskilling initiatives.

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