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Mo Ibrahim
Born
Mobile networks. Ibrahim, a Sudanese engineer, founded Celtel in 1998 when Western operators saw Africa as too risky, and won licences in 14 countries, each negotiated separately. In 2006 Celtel launched One Network, letting customers in several East African countries roam across borders without roaming charges. He sold Celtel in 2005 and created a prize for good governance in African leadership.
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Strive Masiyiwa
Born
Telecoms and fibre. Masiyiwa fought a five-year court battle against Zimbabwe's state monopoly to launch Econet in 1998, then took the business into other countries, including Botswana, Lesotho, Burundi and an early stake in Nigeria. His later company Liquid built fibre-optic cable networks across borders, connecting landlocked countries to undersea cables. He leads Econet and Cassava Technologies as executive chairman.
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Phuthuma Nhleko
Mobile networks. Nhleko led South Africa's MTN from 2002 to 2011 as it grew from a domestic operator into one of Africa's largest, building on its costly 2001 Nigerian licence and buying Investcom in 2006 to enter markets from Ghana to Sudan. MTN's Nigerian business became its largest, and also exposed it to heavy regulatory fines, a reminder that cross-border scale brings cross-border risk.
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Naguib Sawiris
Born
Mobile networks. Sawiris built Orascom Telecom from Egypt into North Africa and beyond, launching Mobinil in Egypt, Djezzy in Algeria and Tunisiana in Tunisia, often bidding for licences others thought too political. Djezzy's long dispute with the Algerian government showed how exposed a foreign operator could be, and Orascom's assets were sold to VimpelCom in 2011. He now chairs Orascom Investment Holding.
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Tony Elumelu
Born
Banking. Elumelu took over the small Standard Trust Bank in Lagos, merged it with the much larger United Bank for Africa in 2005, and took UBA into about 20 African countries, each requiring its own banking licence and local capital. He then founded Heirs Holdings and the Tony Elumelu Foundation, which gives seed funding and training to entrepreneurs across the continent.
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James Mwangi
Banking. Mwangi turned Equity, a near-insolvent Kenyan building society, into a bank for small savers and traders, then took the same low-cost model into Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it bought a majority of a local bank. Expanding meant separate licences, agent networks and mobile banking adapted to each country, rather than running branches from Nairobi.
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Aliko Dangote
Born
Cement and refining. Dangote began as a commodities trader in Lagos, importing goods such as cement, then switched to making it, building plants in Nigeria and then in around ten other African countries, including Ethiopia, Senegal, Zambia and Tanzania. Producing locally rather than shipping cement across borders cut costs in markets with poor roads. His huge oil refinery near Lagos is his biggest bet yet.
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Whitey Basson
Supermarkets. Basson ran Shoprite from 1979, when it had eight stores, until 2016, and from the 1990s took it into more than a dozen African countries. The hard part was logistics: trucking goods from South Africa across borders, building local supply where possible, and dealing with currency controls. Shoprite later withdrew from several markets, including Nigeria and Kenya, showing the limits of the model.
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Koos Bekker
Born
Pay television and internet. Bekker launched the M-Net pay channel in South Africa in 1986, then built MultiChoice and its DStv satellite service across sub-Saharan Africa, selling decoders and subscriptions in dozens of countries and adding local-language and African football content. At Naspers he also bought an early stake in China's Tencent. MultiChoice was taken over by France's Canal+ in 2025.
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Tewolde Gebremariam
Aviation. Tewolde, who rose through Ethiopian Airlines from a junior post, was chief executive from 2011 to 2022 and made Addis Ababa Africa's main connecting hub, so travellers between African cities no longer had to fly via Europe. Where other countries' carriers were weak, Ethiopian took stakes in partner airlines such as ASKY in Togo and Malawian Airlines. Ethiopian is state-owned, but its expansion was run on commercial lines.
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Shola Akinlade
Payments. Akinlade co-founded Paystack in Lagos in 2015 with Ezra Olubi to let Nigerian businesses accept card and bank payments online with a few lines of code, solving the failed payments that hobbled African e-commerce. Paystack then expanded into Ghana, South Africa and Kenya, adapting to each country's banks and mobile money, and was bought by Stripe in 2020.
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Olugbenga Agboola
Payments. Agboola co-founded Flutterwave in 2016 to connect payments between African countries, whose banks, card networks and mobile money systems often could not talk to each other. Flutterwave works by obtaining licences and banking partners market by market, so a merchant in one country can be paid from another in local currency. Its regulatory troubles in Kenya showed how much depends on each national licence.
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