From tech leaders, innovators, and investors to activists, Rest of World has identified 100 people outside Silicon Valley and the West whose efforts directly impact countries where the majority of the world’s population lives.
They set out to find 100 of the most influential, innovative, and trailblazing personalities in fintech, e-commerce, policy, digital infrastructure, and a range of other sectors that intersect with and influence technology for the inaugural RoW100: Global Tech’s Changemakers.
To put together the list, their reporters and editors researched individuals in each regional ecosystem who have made an outsized contribution to their sectors while facing logistical, financial, and political challenges that come with building something ground breaking in those communities. They spoke to dozens of sources, many of them peers of the people on this list, to gauge the true impact of our nominees beyond the hype and the press release cycle.
Ethiopian Addis Alemayehou is included in this list. He is the founder and chairman of Kanzana Group, a holding company with stakes in more than a dozen early stage companies across Africa, including mobile service provider Arada Mobile, streaming service Avetol, and Flex Towers, which delivers infrastructure for telecomms providers. He is one of the biggest cheerleaders for Ethiopia’s nascent tech ecosystem. Alemayehou’s entrepreneurial spirit was born in Canada, where he started buying and leasing properties when he was 18, after moving there to join his family. Ten years later, Alemayehou found his way back to Ethiopia, where he began working in the nonprofit sector and later broke into telecommunications.
All the individuals featured on the Global Tech’s Changemakers list influence how products are made and distributed, how entrepreneurs are funded, and how tech is regulated and its users protected far beyond their local markets. As a result of the extraordinary headwinds they face, our editorial team believes these leaders are more innovative, more thoughtful, and better at sharing new ideas than most people in the Western world understand.
Source: www.restofworld.org