Africa is home to some of the world’s most creative and determined founders — builders who are using AI not just to chase commercial wins, but to transform communities. This summit’s panel, “Building AI Solutions for Good: How They Did It,” brings four of these stories to the stage.
Together, our panelists will unpack how African founders are deploying AI to solve systemic challenges, what it really takes to build ethically in low-resource environments, and what the ecosystem — investors, policymakers, and communities alike — needs to do next to support AI-for-good ventures across the continent.
Here’s who’s joining the conversation.
Tolulope Abikoye
Founder, JoyeDapp
With over 15 years of experience spanning fintech, energy, public sector, commerce, and regtech, Tolu has built a career on turning market gaps into missions. She currently leads strategic sales, where bold partnership initiatives have driven customer retention and market expansion across Africa and other emerging markets — always with an eye toward financial inclusion.
That same instinct for finding the overlooked problem led her to build JoyeDapp, a digital health app supporting women experiencing postnatal depression — a space maternal health conversations rarely reach. She’s also developing a second venture focused on inclusive, long-term social impact. Tolu is a builder, strategist, and advocate for women entrepreneurs who believes business and purpose aren’t in tension — they’re the same project.
Kalkidan Demille
Co-Founder & COO, Addis AI
Kalkidan leads operations, partnerships, and product deployment at Addis AI, a company building voice-first AI infrastructure for African languages. Addis AI has developed speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and large language models for Amharic and Afaan Oromo — including a recent release of 28 production-ready voices that outperform any major platform currently supporting these languages.
The platform now serves more than 150,000 users, supports over 1,500 developers, and has processed over 20 million API calls. Kalkidan works closely with governments, nonprofits, and enterprises to deploy voice-first AI that removes language, literacy, and accessibility barriers in agriculture, education, and public services — ensuring African languages have a real seat in the future of AI.
Yaw Annor Acheampong
Founder & CEO, Anaase Technology | Creator of African AI
Yaw is a Ghanaian AI developer and entrepreneur building African AI — a platform designed to understand, speak, and serve African languages and communities. His work rests on a simple conviction: Africa shouldn’t only use artificial intelligence, it should build it.
He’s currently leading the development of multilingual AI systems, creating African-language datasets, and contributing to research that improves speech recognition for low-resource languages. At the summit, Yaw will share the lessons learned from building AI for underserved communities — and why locally developed AI is essential to Africa’s future.
Bidemi Adedire-Abayomi
Founder, The Smile Outreach Foundation | P.E.R.I.O.D. Initiative
Bidemi is a communications and idea strategist who builds movements across Africa and the Global South, replacing the single story often told about the continent with narratives of progress, agency, and everyday excellence. She leads communications at GivingTuesday Africa, where her multi-year strategy earned press coverage reaching over 3 million people across 16 countries in 2025 alone.
She also founded Africa’s first association for podcasters and voice artists — now 1,000+ creators strong across 20+ countries — and The Smile Outreach, an adolescent-health and women’s-empowerment nonprofit that has reached more than 20,000 young people across Nigeria through programmes like Hand-to-Mind, Voices Against Violence, and the PERIOD Initiative. Bidemi is based in Abuja, Nigeria.
What to Expect
This panel will move through five key themes:
- Contextual AI — Building solutions rooted in African realities: languages, infrastructure, data, and culture.
- Innovation & Impact — From concept to scale: translating AI-driven ideas into measurable social outcomes.
- Ethics & Equity — Navigating bias, data governance, and responsible AI in under-resourced environments.
- Ecosystem Building — What AI-for-good ventures need from investment, policy, talent, and collaboration.
- The Future — The next frontier for African AI, and the role founders will play in shaping it.
Whether you’re building, funding, or simply curious about what ethical, locally-rooted AI looks like in practice, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss. Secure your slot for free: https://luma.com/no05878d
See you there.
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