Elie Habimana

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Elie Habimana

Elie Habimana

Norrsken East Africa, Managing Director

Elie Habimana is in the business of density. As the Managing Director of Norrsken East Africa, he has spent 2025 proving that when you put the right founders, investors, and policymakers in the same room, magic happens. He has grown the Norrsken community into one of the largest and most active startup networks on the continent.

Habimana led the sold-out Africa/Week summit, bringing together over 1,000 participants to shape the future of African innovation with a focus on local ownership of funding systems. As part of the event, he launched the inaugural Capital & Returns Forum, creating a platform for experts to explore funding strategies that balance profit with positive global impact.

Under his leadership, the Norrsken community expanded to more than 1,500 members from 300 companies, establishing it as one of the continent’s largest startup networks. He also secured a strategic partnership with the Bank of Kigali to support SME growth, beginning with financing solutions for electric vehicles, and facilitated high-level dialogues between fintech startups and corporate leaders to accelerate innovation across sectors.

Beyond the startup ecosystem, Habimana has extended his influence into education, joining the board of the African Olympiad Academy, where he supports initiatives that develop the next generation of African talent. Through his work, he has solidified Norrsken’s status as the operating system for Rwanda’s tech ambition.

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