Africa’s Tech Ambition Isn’t The Problem. Leadership Is

Nairobi has hosted a sitting president of the United States, a Pope, and earlier this year, more than thirty African heads of state in a single week. I have sat close enough to the machinery behind several of these moments to notice something that rarely makes the press coverage: the hardest part was never the technology. It was getting people who don’t normally sit in the same room, protocol officers, security agencies, telecom engineers, city planners, private sponsors, to move in the same direction at the same time.

I have spent nearly two decades on different sides of that same problem: inside a telco, Safaricom, that helped build mobile money and connectivity for a country that leapfrogged conventional banking infrastructure; inside government, advising Kenya’s President’s Delivery Unit on digital strategy; and now as an entrepreneur running technology and communications ventures across East Africa, and as co-founder of a platform, the Africa Technology Leadership Forum, built specifically because I kept running into the same institutional wall no matter which side of the table I sat on.

Here it is, plainly: Africa does not have a technology ambition problem. It has a leadership design problem. Kenya, precisely because it is so often held up as the continent’s technology bellwether, is as good a place as any to see why.

Consider research commercialisation — not an abstract policy topic, but a concrete Kenyan one. Kenya’s Research-to-Commercialisation programme, run between 2022 and 2025 with funding from the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, strengthened commercialisation systems in 25 universities, helped establish or reinforce 14 technology-transfer offices, and helped 12 ventures reach scale, reportedly mobilising close to $4.7 million in capital along the way. Those are not small numbers for a three-year programme. But notice what they required: a UK development agency, a Kenyan government innovation agency, universities and a private implementing partner, all coordinating deliberately, because none of them could have produced that outcome alone. That is still the exception in African research systems, not the rule. Most research stops at the point of publication, not because the ideas are weak, but because no single institution owns the job of walking a discovery from laboratory to market.

The same institutional gap shows up around capital. Everyone treats investment inflows into African technology as inherently good news. It is only good news when that money lands on infrastructure and institutions capable of absorbing it. I have watched government departments announce ambitious digital strategies with genuine enthusiasm, then discover a year later that no one had built the procurement pathway, the skills base or the regulatory clarity the strategy quietly assumed would already exist. Kenya’s proposed biotechnology park at Konza Technopolis — a public-private venture reportedly envisaged at roughly $215 million to anchor local pharmaceutical manufacturing — is still moving through feasibility rather than construction. Its progress, or lack of it, will tell us something real about whether our capital ecosystem is maturing fast enough to match our capital appetite.

Then there is the question I think Kenyan and African leaders are least prepared for: technology as foreign policy. Data governance, AI standards and cybersecurity have quietly become instruments of diplomatic leverage, not back-office IT decisions. The African Union’s adoption of a Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy in 2024 was a genuine, substantive step. But a strategy is not the same as a seat at the table where the actual global rules get negotiated. If the standards governing cross-border data flows or AI accountability were being finalised this year, how many African governments could send a delegation equipped to negotiate them, rather than simply comply once they’re set? In my own experience advising across eight African countries, very few. That is not a criticism of any single government. It is a description of a capability gap that sits between ministries of ICT, foreign affairs and finance, a gap no single ministry can close alone.

None of this will matter if citizens don’t trust the systems being built. I have sat in enough rooms where “responsible innovation” was treated as a communications line rather than an operating discipline to know the difference matters. Trust in data protection and digital systems cannot be manufactured by a single company or ministry; it has to be built through sustained, sometimes uncomfortable dialogue between policymakers, technologists, businesses and the communities who will actually use, or refuse to use, what gets built.

What connects every one of these problems is that they are cross-sector by nature and are being managed by single-sector institutions. A minister rarely calls a venture investor before finalising digital policy. A university rarely builds a commercialisation strategy into its research plan from day one. An investor rarely asks about institutional capacity before writing a cheque. Each of these is a small, specific, fixable failure of coordination. Each one also compounds.

This is the exact problem we built the Africa Technology Leadership Conference to force into the open, deliberately convening leaders from government, diplomacy, academia, research, investment and industry in the same room in Nairobi this October, because I do not believe capital, diplomacy, trust or execution will be solved by any one of those groups working in isolation. I have seen what happens when they don’t talk to each other. I have also seen, in programmes like Kenya’s R2C initiative, what becomes possible when they do.

Africa is not short of talent, capital or ambition. Kenya, more than most, has all three in abundance. What remains genuinely scarce is leadership willing to work outside its own lane, to trade the comfort of sector silos for the slower, harder work of building institutions that can actually talk to each other. That is not a technology problem. It is a leadership choice, and it is one every minister, vice chancellor, investor and executive reading this gets to make for themselves, starting now.

*Brian Mung’ei is a Kenyan technology and communications strategist and co-founder of the Africa Technology Leadership Forum (AfricaForum.tech), which convenes the annual Africa Technology Leadership Conference (ATLC). He previously headed Social Media & Digital Strategy at Safaricom PLC and has since advised and consulted for governments and global institutions, including Kenya’s State House, GSMA, Equity Bank, GiZ and Hormuud Telecom, across various African countries.