Redefining innovation: How entrepreneurs in Africa are shaping the future with AI
Despite obstacles in access and funding, entrepreneurs in Africa are building AI solutions unlike anyone else.
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On the outskirts of Oyo State in Nigeria, a farmer named Ajayi huddles by a kerosene lamp and calls into the National Hotline for Agriculture, a toll-free platform that connects him with an expert agronomist.
“I have ten acres of land and I have planted maize already,” Ajayi says. “How many NPK do I need to get?”
“To grow good maize on your 10-acre farm,” the expert replies, “use NPK fertilizer, about twenty big bags in total. Put half in the ground two to three days before you plant your seeds. Then, when your maize is about two to three weeks old, add the other half. This helps your maize grow big and strong just like good meals help children grow.”
Every night in Nigeria, thousands of farmers like Ajayi call the hotline on their feature phones. The expert remembers all of them by name, is fluent in every local dialect, and offers real-time, location-specific advice about the weather, planting schedules, pests and crop diseases, and tips for optimizing growth and climate resilience. Their conversations last twenty minutes on average and are often intimate and deeply human.
But the expert isn’t human. It’s powered by AI.
The National Hotline for Agriculture is the creation of Nigerian startup Crop2Cash and its co-founder and CEO, Acumen Fellow Michael Ogundare. Despite progress over the last few years, AI voice assistants often struggle to pass off as authentic. When it comes to AI voice assistants that speak with an African accent and are fluent in local dialects, they simply didn’t exist until Ogundare and his team built one.
The results are impressive. Before AI, there was only one extension agent for every 10,000 farmers in Africa. Now, that ratio is effectively one-to-one. Crop2Cash is rapidly adding languages and dialects to the engine, which has allowed the company to expand into Kenya and has them eying further growth into the Francophone countries of West Africa.
“With less than a million dollars, we were able to build a customer base of half a million farmers across Nigeria,” said Ogundare. “Now with AI we could be working with tens of millions of farmers across Africa in a short period of time.”
Innovation without infrastructure
In the last two years, AI has gone from the stuff of science fiction to a powerful force revolutionizing industries, economies, and societies at extraordinary speed.
It’s poised to boost GDP for local economies by 26% and to add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. Through the rosiest colored glasses, this growth has the potential to help level the playing field between the Global North and Global South, decreasing the knowledge gap, turbocharging local developers and researchers, and empowering those who have less — if they can get access and investment.
That’s a big if. With the vast majority of AI investment directed to the Global North, and with the vast majority of researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs in the Global South facing limited resources and funding, there’s a growing fear that the Global South could be left behind by the AI revolution. Africa is no exception. It faces glaring gaps in its digital infrastructure, from Internet access and stability to insufficient data centers and computational power. A recent analysis from Zindi found that only five percent of Africa’s AI talent has access to the computational power that it needs.
But entrepreneurs in Africa aren’t waiting for permission or perfect conditions to innovate. Interviews with Acumen investees and Fellows like Ogundare reveal the opposite: Despite the hurdles, they’re embracing AI and deploying the technology in novel ways that have the potential to scale access and opportunity across the continent.
“In terms of scale and reach, AI has changed what is possible for us,” said Dr. Tosan Mogbeyiteren, founder and CEO of WeMUNIZE, a mobile health platform that harnesses AI to expand immunization rates in Nigeria.
Two thousand children die of vaccine-preventable diseases everyday in Nigeria. To address the problem, WeMUNIZE automates scheduling and record-keeping, connects patients with nearby clinics, and generates voice calls from local religious leaders to remind mothers of the importance of vaccinating their children. The religious leaders are real people, but WeMUNIZE’s generative AI application allows it to turn a few pre-recorded sentences into personalized messages for targeted outreach. Since deploying AI, WeMUNIZE has nearly doubled its presence in Nigeria.
“Previously we had been targeting about six thousand children per annum,” said Mogbeyiteren. “Now that generative AI has made the leap to audio files, we’re talking about going for two million.”
Like agriculture and health, education is another sector where AI is making an impact. Zeraki, an Acumen investee and leading education technology company in Kenya, is rolling out a chatbot that provides teachers, administrators, students, and parents with 24/7 support and frees up Zeraki’s customer support team to spend more time with customers in the field. In the future, the company plans to integrate AI throughout its platform so that students get personalized reminders and motivational messages, teachers get helpful insights into performance and planning, and administrators can make more informed decisions to support students and staff.
“AI has the potential to transform education in Africa,” said Isaac Nyangolo, Zeraki’s co-founder and CEO.
“It’s definitely a game changer in the energy sector,” added Josh Whale, founder and CEO of Ampersand, one of the largest electric mobility energy tech startups in Africa.
The Acumen PEII+ investee runs a fleet of e-motos and an energy network for commercial drivers in Kenya and Rwanda and has cut 20% of its operating costs, creating up to 40% savings for drivers, by implementing predictive AI to manage its battery fleet. The company collects about 50 data points every five seconds from every battery pack in the field. It then combines this real-time data with historical data and weather conditions to forecast future demand and make adjustments at charging stations. At high-demand locations, the AI ramps up charging speeds to minimize driver waiting times. At low-demand locations, it decreases charging speeds to give batteries time to recover, thus lengthening their expected lifespan.
“It’s helped us create a competitive advantage over petrol stations,” said Whale.
Building breakthroughs on a budget
What’s most striking about these breakthroughs isn’t just the ingenuity of the AI. It’s the stories behind the innovations — how entrepreneurs in Africa are overcoming insufficient funding, limited computing power, unreliable internet connectivity, and an isolating environment to power AI progress.
“It can feel like a lonely journey,” said Whale. “We’re not bumping into peers and gathering for matcha lattes down on the Mission.”
“If our startup was in Silicon Valley, I’d be surrounded by other startups that have gone through our journey,” echoed Isaac Nyangolo of Zeraki. “We don’t have those people you can call for coffee in our ecosystem, so when you’re building something new, no one has done it before.”
Nyangolo felt the struggle of that isolation for 10 years as Zeraki experimented with large language models and then AI. They fell into a familiar pattern of getting excited about a potential solution, realizing that its complexity exceeded the team’s internal capacities, and leaning on a summer intern who was a PhD student from America, only to run out of time or funding before they could realize a full-fledged product.
“It was deflating,” said Nyangolo. At the same time, those false starts and setbacks helped Zeraki reach a maturity with AI that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
“We used to say, ‘Oh we have this fantastic hammer, let’s look for the nails,’” said Nyangolo. “Now we realize that you have to start with the problem and focus your AI innovation where it fits in nicely with the solution.”
“There’s the technical difficulty of building with AI,” said Mogbeyiteren of WeMUNIZE, “but in our context, the resources that are availed to us are not as robust and can be equally challenging to navigate.”
Mogbeyiteren is a medical doctor by training, “so my technical chops were not sophisticated enough to lead the technical component of the team,” he said. But his team of engineers also lacked the requisite sophistication to build AI tools, so Mogbeyiteren applied for a mentorship facilitated by a cohort of math, physics, and computer science PhD students from the University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois in 2024. He passed that expertise onto his engineers in Nigeria. As they began to build, two of their engineers got recruited away by foreign companies. They ran into problems with computational costs. Through it all they prevailed, turning constraint into a catalyst for AI innovation.
“I call it Frugal AI,” said Mogbeyiteren. “It’s super hard work, but having to overcome these challenges leads to original thinking and innovative results.”
When Michael Ogundare of Crop2Cash started experimenting with AI in 2023, he didn’t have deep pockets or abundant resources to draw upon, certainly not by Silicon Valley standards. What he did have was his own training in computer science and software engineering and a drive to realize the potential of AI no matter the barriers that stood in his path.
“My entire algorithm on social media was completely tuned towards AI and tech,” he said. “I immersed myself in it to the point where at work I was living and breathing work, but at home I was living and breathing AI.”
He traded in his old computer for an M Series Macbook so that he could run models at home and experiment freely. He created a learning curriculum for Crop2Cash’s small engineering team. With funds from a GSMA Innovation Grant, they started building on the Llama open source AI platform from Meta, training the AI on native African speakers. There were failures, setbacks, and false starts. The GSMA Grant team got frustrated.
“They were like, ‘This thing is not working,’” said Ogundare. “I told them to calm down. Don’t worry about it. When I tell you this will work, it will work. It had to work. I spent my days in meetings. I spent my nights writing code.”
In 2024, the Crop2Cash team piloted the solution in the field. The feedback from rural farmers was a mix of intrigue and skepticism on the first call. By the second call, the response was “universally positive.”
“I see constraints and setbacks as really exciting things,” said Ogundare.
“Because we’re on the leading edge of innovation, everything’s not going to work out, nothing’s going to be easy, but it’s exciting to try to do something that nobody else has done and end up building something original.”
Shaping the future of AI on Africa’s terms
The rest of the world is catching on to the AI opportunity in Africa. In April chipmaker Nvidia announced plans to open its first AI factory in South Africa this year, to be followed by additional AI factories in Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria. Google, Huawei, IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft have pledged to increase AI investments on the continent as well.
As a result, AI investment in Africa is projected to grow faster than almost anywhere else in the world, with an annual growth rate of close to 30% over the next six years.
But whom this investment will ultimately serve remains to be seen. There’s growing concern that as the Global North builds AI capacity on the continent, it could exacerbate issues around digital colonialism and data extraction. Instead of amplifying Africa’s emerging, homegrown AI ecosystem, the investment rush could end up reinforcing the dominance of global tech giants and exploiting local resources without ensuring equivalent benefits or profits return to the continent.
So far, little of the investment rush has reached entrepreneurs on the ground. Josh Whale of Ampersand described the current fundraising environment as “a small boat.” Given investor reluctance, startups often resort to debt funding in dollars, which leaves them vulnerable to catastrophic failure at the hands of foreign exchange swings. The current recalibration around aid funding further threatens investment for entrepreneurs who are using AI to tackle social and environmental problems.
“Our conversations around scaling are ongoing,” said Mogbeyiteren of WeMUNIZE.
Nonetheless, all the entrepreneurs we interviewed remain bullish about the future of AI in Africa and the role that African entrepreneurs will play in shaping it on their own terms. They’re bullish in part because the barrier to entry for AI tools is getting so much lower.
“The cost of innovation used to be much higher,” said Nyangolo. “Now with the new models, it simplifies that prototyping piece, both in terms of speed and cost and in terms of allowing us to validate product ideas without getting stuck on the tech.”
In turn, more African companies are experimenting and deploying AI, and the ecosystem for AI innovators is becoming more robust.
“AI usage is growing like wildfire in Africa,” said Ogundare. “Business folks who are non-technical are realizing they don’t need to hire an engineer to do this. The community is expanding, and people are coming together to share what’s working and what’s not.”
AI hubs, consortiums, conferences, and summits are cropping up across the continent, and entrepreneurs, researchers, and policymakers are joining forces to advance important framework thinking around how to build AI for African realities.
“Most current AI systems are chat-based interfaces, a design choice shaped by user experiences more common in the West,” said Mogbeyiteren. “But in Africa, the more pervasive algorithms are cultural and religious. If AI is adapted to those contexts, it could achieve deep penetration and address some of our most pressing societal challenges.”
Entrepreneurs in Africa have already begun that work. By tackling complex problems with limited resources and deploying AI tools in rural settings, they’re solving local problems and creating inclusive, scalable innovations with global relevance. To unlock AI’s full potential, the world must learn from what they’re doing and invest not only in Africa’s AI capacity but in African leadership, ideas, and entrepreneurship.
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