Temidayo Oniosun

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Temidayo Oniosun

Temidayo Oniosun

Space in Africa, Founder and Managing Director

As founder and managing director of Space in Africa, Temidayo Oniosun, in 2025, reinforced his role as one of Africa’s most influential space economy architects. As the leading strategic intelligence firm for the continent’s space industry, Space in Africa acted as a critical bridge between the African Union and the global space community during the April 2025 inauguration of the Africa Space Agency headquarters.

Oniosu’s Space in Africa convened the 2025 NewSpace Africa Conference concurrently in Cairo, ensuring that the inauguration was attended by a global network of commercial and institutional leaders, while its documentary, “Africa’s Journey to Space,” provided the historical narrative for the event. Beyond logistics, Space in Africa provided the foundational market intelligence that justified the agency’s economic roadmap and successfully managed the logo competition that gave the agency its pan-African visual identity.

Most ambitious of his 2025 moves was leading the historic “Egusi in Space” mission, which entailed dispatching West African melon seeds (Egusi) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station. It was the first time a seed native to West Africa, and an item from Nigeria, reached orbit. The mission opens up the continent to participate in frontier food resilience and crop science research, and also the possibility that, someday, if humans lived in space, they might enjoy one of West Africa’s beloved Egusi soup.

Oniosun expanded Space in Africa’s influence through strategic consulting on high-impact continental programmes like the €100 million Africa–EU Space Partnership designed to strengthen institutional capacity, enhance resilience, promote digitalisation, and advance climate action.

In 2025, Space in Africa’s efforts turned into a globally respected intelligence engine that earned Oniosun a seat on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Space Technologies for the 2025-2026 term.

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