The Global Africa Business Initiative (GABI) has advanced its Digital and Health Action Pathways following a Solutions Lab convened on the sidelines of the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, earlier last month.
The 15 May working session brought together senior public and private sector leaders to develop actionable plans for overcoming the structural barriers slowing the continent’s economic transformation, with a focus on execution gaps and financing bottlenecks.
“Africa does not face a shortage of ideas, but a significant gap in execution and the financing required to scale solutions,” said Sanda Ojiambo, Assistant Secretary-General and CEO of the United Nations Global Compact. “The aim is to ensure that commitments are translated into measurable, real-world outcomes at scale.”
Key discussion themes included accelerating investment in digital public infrastructure, connectivity, skills and governance to ensure AI becomes a development multiplier; reducing adoption timelines for proven infrastructure solutions; and deploying financing models for sovereign digital infrastructure across multiple African markets.
Caitlin Burton, CEO of Rwanda-headquartered AI and robotics company Zipline Africa, called for urgency in moving beyond pilots. “Across much of Africa, adoption is still moving at the pace of traditional aid cycles rather than the speed of modern technology deployment. We need financing models and accountability mechanisms that can collapse the adoption timeline for proven infrastructure from decades to years,” she said.
Kate Kallot, founder and CEO of Nairobi-based data infrastructure company Amini, stressed the need for sovereign AI infrastructure. “Many developers across the continent lack the tools or access required to build solutions that reflect local realities. The challenge now is how to deploy financing models for sovereign digital infrastructure at scale, across multiple markets, within the next 12 months,” she said.
Nigeria’s Federal Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, warned that connectivity and skills gaps remained the central risk. “The real challenge is not whether Africa will adopt AI, but whether we have built the absorptive capacity required to use it to transform our economies and key sectors,” he said.
The GABI Action Pathways for Digital Transformation and Health were originally launched at Unstoppable Africa in September 2025. Senior leaders from Afreximbank, Ecobank, Safaricom, McKinsey, ServiceNow and the United Nations participated in the Kigali session.
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