Olumide Balogun

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Olumide Balogun

Olumide Balogun

Olumide Balogun, director, Google, West Africa

For much of 2025, Olumide Balogun used Google’s scale as one of the most important Big Tech companies in the world to deliver measurable outcomes for startups, small businesses, and AI talent across West Africa. As Google’s director for the region, his work this year was defined by clear numbers and long-term bets on skills and infrastructure.

In November, Balogun announced ₦3 billion ($2.1 million) Google.org investment to build Nigeria’s AI talent pipeline. Unlike short-term bootcamps, the programme targets tertiary institutions directly, training lecturers and teaching assistants, updating AI curricula, and reaching over 11,000 students across at least 10 universities. The goal of the programme hinges on a “train the trainer” initiative to produce skilled AI graduates.

On the startup side, Balogun oversaw Google for Startups Accelerator Africa, Cohort 9, selecting 15 AI-first startups from nearly 1,500 applications across seven countries. Each startup received up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits, hands-on technical support, and access to global investors. Since 2018, its accelerator alumni have raised over $300 million and created more than 3,500 jobs, making it one of Africa’s most effective founder programmes.

For small businesses, Balogun expanded Google Hustle Academy, which has now trained over 10,000 SMEs since launch, and awarded ₦75 million ($51,500) in grants. In 2025, Google partnered with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to train 7,500 more SMEs across 19 African countries, focusing on AI productivity, cloud tools, and cross-border trade. 80% of graduates reported an outsized increase in revenue, according to Balogun, turning their newfound skills into income. Balogun’s work in 2025 directly impacted African early-stage startups to achieve scale (a noteworthy one being Midddleman, a Nigerian cross-border trade startup), and supported businesses to contribute to Africa’s informal economy growth.

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