Nairobi has hosted a sitting President of the United States, a Pope, and, earlier this year, more than 30 African heads of state in a single week. Having sat close enough to the machinery behind several of these moments, I have noticed something that rarely makes the press coverage: the hardest part was never the technology.
It was getting people who do not normally sit in the same room — protocol officers, security agencies, telecom engineers, city planners and private sponsors — to move in the same direction at the same time.
I have spent nearly two decades on different sides of this same challenge: inside Safaricom, the telecommunications company 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.
I am also a co-founder of the Africa Technology Leadership Forum, a platform built specifically because I kept encountering the same institutional wall, regardless of which side of the table I was sitting 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 regarded as the continent’s technology bellwether, is as good a place as any to understand why.
Consider research commercialisation. This is not simply an abstract policy issue; it is a concrete Kenyan example. Kenya’s Research-to-Commercialisation programme, which ran 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 significant numbers for a three-year programme.
But look closely at what made those results possible: a UK development agency, a Kenyan government innovation agency, universities and a private implementing partner all had to coordinate deliberately because none of them could have achieved the outcome alone.
That remains the exception rather than the rule in African research systems.
Most research stops at publication, not because the ideas are weak, but because no single institution owns the responsibility of taking a discovery from the laboratory to the market.
The same institutional gap appears around capital.
Investment inflows into African technology are often treated as inherently positive news. But investment is only good news when the money lands in infrastructure and institutions capable of absorbing it.
I have watched government departments announce ambitious digital strategies with genuine enthusiasm, only to discover a year later that no one had built the procurement pathway, skills base or regulatory clarity that 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 important about whether our capital ecosystem is maturing quickly enough to match our appetite for capital.
Then there is the question I believe 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 rather than back-office IT decisions.
The African Union’s adoption of a Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy in 2024 was a genuine and substantive step forward. But having a strategy is not the same as having a seat at the table where the actual global rules are negotiated.
If the standards governing cross-border data flows or AI accountability were being finalised this year, how many African governments could send delegations equipped to negotiate those rules rather than simply comply once they are established?
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 exists between ministries of ICT, foreign affairs and finance — a gap that no single ministry can close on its own.
None of this will matter if citizens do not 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 that the distinction matters.
Trust in data protection and digital systems cannot be manufactured by a single company or ministry. It has to be built through sustained, and sometimes uncomfortable, dialogue between policymakers, technologists, businesses and the communities that will actually use — or refuse to use — what is built.
What connects all these challenges is that they are cross-sector by nature, yet they 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 represents a small, specific and fixable failure of coordination.
Each one also compounds.
This is the exact problem we built the Africa Technology Leadership Conference to bring into the open. The conference will deliberately convene leaders from government, diplomacy, academia, research, investment and industry in the same room in Nairobi this October.
I do not believe capital, diplomacy, trust or execution can be solved by any one of these groups working in isolation.
I have seen what happens when they do not talk to each other. I have also seen, through programmes such as 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 — leadership willing to trade the comfort of sector silos for the slower, harder work of building institutions that can actually communicate and work together.
That is not a technology problem.
It is a leadership choice.
And it is a choice every minister, vice chancellor, investor and executive reading this gets to make for themselves, starting now.
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