Paula Ingabire

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Paula Ingabire

Paula Ingabire

Minister of ICT and Innovation, Rwanda

If you want to understand the velocity of Rwanda’s digital transformation, look at the numbers under Paula Ingabire, the country’s Minister of ICT and Innovation. In 2025, she oversaw a staggering explosion in connectivity while rolling out live 5G services nationwide.

But her most consequential work this year was invisible. In December, she launched eKash, Rwanda’s national digital payment system, bringing together banks, mobile money operators, and fintechs into one seamless network. For the first time, people across Rwanda can make instant, cashless payments without friction—a small step for technology, a giant leap for everyday life.

Connectivity has surged under her leadership. Rwanda’s 4G user base jumped from half a million to five million, and 5G services are now live, thanks to bold public-private partnerships and a national broadband push. But Paula’s vision goes beyond speed and coverage. She was named on the TIME100 AI 2025 list for her work in responsibly using AI to drive growth in healthcare, agriculture, and governance. At the World Economic Forum, she shared a roadmap showing AI could add up to 6% to Rwanda’s GDP.

Paula also knows that progress isn’t just about technology—it’s about inclusion. She has focused on closing the digital divide in rural areas, supporting women in tech, and building international partnerships, like a high-tech printing plant with the UAE for secure ID solutions.

Paula Ingabire is the kind of leader who sees technology not just as tools or infrastructure, but as a way to make life better for everyone.

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