Lagos, Nigeria, a vibrant hub of innovation and ambition. It's the annual Goalkeepers event by the Gates Foundation, a gathering that spotlights Africa's indispensable role in shaping our global future, aiming for a more equitable and prosperous world by 2030.
Launched by the Gates Foundation, Goalkeepers is a multi-year campaign dedicated to accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a period that brings together changemakers from across the globe to share their stories. We need action from everyone everywhere. 17 Sustainable Development Goals are our guide. They are a to-do list for people and planet and a blueprint for success. The SDGs, adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015, are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030.
The Gates Foundation, chaired by Bill Gates, has committed billions of dollars to global health and development over its 25-year history. The Goalkeepers report released annually tracks progress on 17 SDG indicators, highlighting successes and areas where more work is needed. Key figures often cited include the dramatic reduction in childhood mortality, a testament to global efforts. Yet millions of children, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, don't reach their fifth birthday. The foundation's work touches some crucial areas like maternal and child health, infectious diseases like malaria, polio, HIV, agricultural development, and financial inclusion. Its belief is that sustained investment, particularly in human capital, is the bedrock of lasting change.
Guests arrive at the venue for the maiden edition of the Goalkeepers 2030 being hosted in Lagos, Nigeria's southwest region. The atmosphere here is electric in the Grand Hall as participants await the commencement of the event. The melodic power of an African choir fills the space, a stirring collection of tunes that speak to the continent's rich heritage and vibrant spirit.
Naija, how far? That's what I'm talking about. Welcome to Goalkeepers Lagos 2025.
This year's Goalkeepers 2030 lives up to its promise. The discussions dive deep into the future of progress in Africa, a future where innovation and collaboration are paramount.
Welcome to the stage Dr. Olubayi Olubayi.
The early panel session focuses on scaling solutions, particularly in the critical areas of artificial intelligence and health. We hear from leading experts, innovators, and policymakers who are championing groundbreaking approaches. Imagine AI being leveraged to predict disease outbreaks, to personalize healthcare, or to optimize resource allocation in underserved communities.
Nkem, what was the first moment you realized that traditional financial solutions were not working for low-income women, and how did you approach designing something different?
Okay. When I started Mama Money, we first started training women to gain skills that could help them generate income. So we taught them skills like baking, soap making. But after training these women, out of 10 women, eight will come back to us and say, "I do not have money to buy materials to start." So most of them kept coming back. So I sat down and I said I needed to design something for the kind of women that we work with. So we came up with a simple, easy-to-use progressive web app. So with this app on low-end smartphones, the women could easily just request for microloans. For the women that do not have access to these devices, we had women leaders in their communities. So our women started receiving funding.
But we started getting calls from women across Nigeria, "Mama Money, we also need your help," and we wanted to replicate this. So in 2022, we pivoted into agent banking. So what that did for us is that we have female agents, like Mama Money representatives, across different communities in Nigeria conducting banking transactions for themselves, onboarding other women that have been excluded from formal financial services due to culture, religion. And these women would onboard them, conduct financial transactions for them and also other people in their communities and earn through this. You need to see these women. These women are women that never had contact with formal financials. They don't know how to use simple banking apps, and we are able to teach them how to use this using a simple, easy-to-use progressive web app and point-of-sale terminals. And you need to see this. We don't say low-income women, we say no-income women. Most of these women, they are churning out billions of transactions as we speak. Thank you.
Fantastic. So, Bayo, I'm coming over to you next. Why is it critical that Africa builds its own AI systems? And what's at risk when we rely on imported technologies and global datasets that do not reflect our context?
Thank you. I think the dominant fact is that AI is about people, not about technology. And if AI will serve the people, it must understand the people—the richness of their language, their culture, their epistemology, their value system—because it's those knowledge that AI will codify into a sequence of instructions that people can interact with in solving everyday problems.
Now, if you look at the whole construct of AI, it's all about patterns. AI must be fed with enough patterns to learn so that it can be used in many use cases. So for example, if I want AI to help me predict the possibility of a disease, I need to train it with enough types of plans so that it can learn that visual, and when next somebody comes with a different pattern, it will be able to give an answer. But if I train AI with data that is biased, that is discriminated, that is not representative, it's not going to give me what I'm looking for. Now, if you look at all the most complex and sophisticated AI models that we have today, more than 90% of them fail on African languages and African context. Why? More than 95% of African languages are not currently digitized. So there is nothing for AI to learn from.
So if AI cannot learn our content, whether in images, pictures, text, it cannot generate context-specific and nuanced answers for us to answer our everyday problems. For that reason, it is imperative to build AI that is localized, that is context-aware, and that is true to what makes us a people. And that aligns with a popular saying in Nigeria that we say you cannot barb or shave a man's head in his absence; he must be there. And neither can you give a woman a very gorgeous hairstyle even with the best of logistics systems; she must be physically present and she must be the center of attention as well. So we must be the center of attention if you want to build AI for Africa. Data must be collected by the people, the models must be built by the people, and the product must be nuanced by the people. Why? AI is a solution of the people, by the people, and to serve the peculiar realities of the people. Thank you.
Thank you to our panelists. This was an extremely energizing conversation. Let's put our hands together for the two of them.
These aren't just dreams; they are becoming realities. Beyond the policy discussions, the event is also a platform for inspiring stories—stories of those who dared to live their dream, who saw a need and rose to meet it. From grassroots health workers in rural villages to tech entrepreneurs developing lifesaving applications, these individuals are the true catalysts of change, demonstrating the power of local leadership and ingenuity.
In November 2019, my world stopped. My father passed away: a stroke triggered by undiagnosed hypertension and diabetes, two treatable conditions we just didn't know. That grief stayed buried until the world paused in 2020. It was in the silence of the lockdown I asked myself, "How many other people are losing their loved ones because they don't know what's going on in their bodies?" And then I asked a second question: "What can I do to change that?" That's how HealthTracka was born, a digital health platform that brings lab testing into people's homes.
In our first year, we conducted 5,000 tests. Today, we have delivered over 50,000 tests at home. We have created jobs and impacted over 200,000 lives through our platform. What began as a simple idea—helping people skip crowded hospitals to get into basic lab testing—has grown into something bigger. We started getting requests from women saying, "We want to self-test." So at first we said no, but then we thought, "Why not?" That's how we launched HPV self-sampling kits for cervical cancer screening, and later Lemon, the first self-sampling kit in Nigeria made by us, assembled here at home.
Today, through my work at Bridges to Prosperity, we're building more than 650 literal bridges and roads across rural Africa, connecting millions of people to schools, markets, clinics, the things that are important to them and the people that are important to them. And I believe that access is dignity and infrastructure is justice made visible. And I believe that when we make that investment, it is because you have seen something worth building, right? But let's be clear, a single seed doesn't yield a harvest. What makes the difference is water, soil, sunlight, and time. And that's the kind of patient commitment we need in Africa. Not a moment, not a movement, not a hiccup, not just applause, but patience. This is a bet I've made and a bet I will keep showing up for.
But I must admit, I'm not doing it alone. I have quite literally joined hands with someone who is also committed to telling Africa's story, someone who I'm kind of proud to call my husband. His music blends rhythm, resistance, future, and memory. It is the reflection of the richness we all carry and the power that unlocks when we weave our strands into something bolder and newer. So, please help me welcome the incredible Jude "M.I" Abaga.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. If you're happy to be here tonight, let me hear you make some noise! What a beautiful room. This song is called "Epic" because it's time for Africa to rise and be epic. Sometimes when I think about the trouble I see, sometimes when I remain... Oh yeah. Sometimes when I look around the places I've been, I love... and that's when, and that's when I realize we're epic. Some people's life is sweet, my life is diabetic. I need to find a medic, but there's no one to call, and plus I have no credit. I feel the doubt is creeping in, I know I shouldn't let it, but I've been reading what they wrote, I wish I hadn't read it. Maybe I could pick and choose, I wish that I could edit. I wish the wishes were the basis upon which we merit. But hey, this is life, and she's a cruel wife. Though she do me wrong, I got to treat her right. Yo, I live with NEPA, I got to be the light. The short black boy, baby, trying to reach the heights. Nothing is given freely, but we can live ideally if we can seize the moment and own it, be the proponent. Yo, we all came to play a great part, and even Braveheart had a late start. Even great artists make fake art until they realize just who they are. And we are like movie stars not aware of the who, the what, why, why we're here, staring into the sky, trying to dry a tear, waiting on a hero, and then I appear. What my message is, it's really you, man, to change the drama that you're going through. You're the change, you're the hope, you're the miracle, and you are all the strength you need in times of miracles. Nothing is given freely, but we can live ideally if we can seize the moment and own it, be the proponents. It takes a moment, but I hope you get it. The world's been waiting on you, Goalkeepers. You're epic.
Thank you so much, Mr. Incredible. Before we get to Emma, I don't know if we heard it clearly when Enitan said she's built over 600 literal bridges across the continent. I don't know if you guys registered that. Connecting rural areas, markets, schools. Come on, can we give her... Come on. Come on. That's unbelievable. That's unbelievable work. And then she built a bridge to M's heart as well. Very well done. Many thanks to M.I and of course that amazing choir.
Now earlier tonight, I talked about how Africa is a continent of young self-starters. When they have an idea, they roll up their sleeves and get to work. Now our next speaker is one of those people. I'm pleased to introduce her. She's the founder and CEO of Food for Education, a homegrown Kenyan initiative that feeds more than 500,000 children every day. And that's just the start. She'll talk today about how she's gotten this far and her big plans for the future. Please welcome Wawira Njiru.
My story started in a tiny kitchen 13 years ago: 25 kids, $1,200 raised from friends in university, and a simple truth: hungry kids can't learn, and lost days in classrooms mean lost potential. Today, Food for Education serves over 530,000 school meals every day across Kenya. It sounds like scale, right? But sometimes, as my Naija people would say, it's all packaging.
Behind the numbers are difficult decisions and invisible infrastructure, especially when building in and for Africa. Let's face it: this continent, and I love it so much, is messy. But we keep solving problems in pieces, working in silos, then wondering why collective progress is hard: one pot for hunger, another for maternal health, a third for education. For the families we serve, it's never separate. These issues bleed into each other, and when we treat them as if they're separate, we don't just lose efficiency, we lose futures. My first big grant was 60,000 shillings—$60,000, I converted it to shillings four years later. It came through a cold application where I argued that school feeding was a climate change solution. It wasn't untrue. We now run on green energy, operate at near zero waste, and source locally. African ingenuity must step forward. Not someday, not eventually—now. Thank you.
