Strive Masiyiwa

Strive Masiyiwa is a London-based Zimbabwean billionaire businessman, telecommunications pioneer, technology investor, and philanthropist whose life story is widely regarded as one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurial journeys in modern African history. Born on 29 January 1961 in Zimbabwe, he is the founder and executive chairman of two international technology groups — Econet Global and Cassava Technologies — and, as of 2026, Forbes estimates his net worth at approximately US$2.2 billion. Across nearly four decades, he has founded and invested in businesses spanning Africa, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East, New Zealand, and the United States, earning him the popular moniker 'the Bill Gates of Africa'.

The Masiyiwa story begins against the backdrop of a Rhodesia in political turmoil. In 1965, the Rhodesian government of the late Prime Minister Ian Smith adopted the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), plunging the country into sanctions and isolation. Three years after UDI, in 1968, the Masiyiwa family relocated to Zambia, settling in Kitwe — a city in north-central Zambia famed for its copper mines. It was in Kitwe that Strive completed his primary school education, and it was there, too, that his entrepreneurial instincts were first nurtured by his mother, an entrepreneur who came up with the idea for a young Strive to earn his own pocket money by selling chewing gum at his primary school.

When he turned twelve, his parents sent him to private school in Edinburgh, Scotland, for his secondary education, where he graduated in 1978. Fresh out of high school that same year, a young Masiyiwa travelled back to Zimbabwe — his country of birth — intending to join the war of liberation. His plan was to cross over into Zambia and fight alongside the freedom fighters to dislodge the Rhodesian government. But when Strive reached Zambia he met his cousin, who was in charge of a training camp for the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), the military wing of ZANU-PF. "He told me, 'Look, we're about to win anyway, and what we really need is people like you to help rebuild the country.' I took his advice," Masiyiwa later recalled in a 2002 interview with Time magazine.

Instead of a gun, Strive ended up taking a letter to the British Council that would help him secure a scholarship for university education in Britain. He went on to earn a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Wales (Cardiff University) in 1983, after which he worked briefly in the computer industry in Cambridge, England. But being the patriotic man he is, Masiyiwa chose to return to Zimbabwe in 1984 — after a 17-year absence — hoping to help rebuild a country whose economy was recovering from the effects of a protracted Rhodesian Bush War.

He joined the state-owned telephone company, the Post and Telecommunications Corporation (PTC), as a senior engineer and was later promoted to principal engineer. After saving about US$75 from his salary, Masiyiwa quit his job in 1986 to form his own electrical contracting company, Retrofit Engineering, which asserted itself quickly and was soon hoovering up lucrative government contracts. In 1993, envisioning cellular communications as the next big thing, he decided to venture into the uncharted territory of the mobile phone business by forming Econet Zimbabwe. He was only 25, already a successful businessman with six or seven years of experience, but acutely aware that telecommunications was a capital-intensive industry.

He sold his engineering company and approached his former employers with the idea of a joint venture. "I thought it was going to be a fairly simple thing. I was wrong. They told me, 'We have more important things to do here, so don't bother us.' I had a letter written to me by the head of PTC saying the whole thing was a fad, it was going to disappear," Masiyiwa recounted in a 2017 discussion at Stanford Graduate School of Business's Africa Business Club. PTC — now TelOne — fought hard to protect its monopoly by battling Masiyiwa in court; he lost the initial Supreme Court case. Yet more resistance was to come from the Robert Mugabe-led government, which flatly refused to issue him a license to operate.

Probably drawing inspiration from his very name — which means to make great effort to achieve or obtain something, and can also mean to struggle or fight vigorously — Masiyiwa became only more determined. The matter moved to the Constitutional Court, where the argument shifted from PTC's monopoly to the constitutional right to freedom of expression. At the time, roughly 75 percent of Zimbabweans had never even heard a telephone ring, and this became the gist and crux of the Econet case, capturing newspaper headlines locally and across the entire African continent. The Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe finally ruled in his favour after a gruelling five-year legal battle that took him to the very brink of bankruptcy — a landmark judgment widely regarded as one of the key milestones in opening the African telecommunications sector to private capital.

Econet Wireless Zimbabwe connected its first cellphone subscriber to the new network in 1998, and in July of that same year Masiyiwa listed the company on the local stock exchange. Two years later, in 2000, he left Zimbabwe with his family for South Africa. He later told the UK publication The Guardian (2009) that his real reason for the move was to realize his dream of creating a truly multinational African business: "This is the space we have been trying to fill, to pioneer the development of African companies that have a global outlook. South Africa was the only place where there was an outlook about building businesses that go to other countries." After more than ten years in South Africa, he relocated to London to turn his holding company into a multinational dominating global technology and telecommunications markets.

Among his most successful ventures is Liquid Intelligent Technologies (formerly Liquid Telecom), the London-based, privately held group that has grown into Africa's largest satellite and fibre optic business — spanning the continent with more than 110,000 kilometres of cable from Cape Town to Cairo and connecting countries from east to west. In the United States, he partnered with leading telecoms entrepreneur John Stanton in a venture called Trilogy International Partners, which built New Zealand's third mobile network operator, 2degrees. Other start-ups and investments under his umbrella include Mascom Wireless Botswana, Econet Wireless Nigeria (now Airtel Nigeria), Trilogy Capital Partners Canada, Africa Data Centres, Sasai Fintech, and the Telrad Group in Israel.

In 2021, Masiyiwa consolidated his pan-African technology empire under a new banner, Cassava Technologies, of which he is the founder. Cassava operates over 100,000 km of fibre optic cables carrying internet across various African countries, alongside Africa's largest network of interconnected, carrier-neutral data centres, cloud and cybersecurity services, fintech, solar renewable energy, and on-demand digital platforms. His Zimbabwean subsidiaries — Econet Wireless Zimbabwe (1998) and Cassava Fintech (2018) — remain well-performing holding companies listed on the local stock exchange, with Econet now the second-largest company in Zimbabwe by market capitalisation. He also owns Steward Bank and the country's biggest mobile money platform, EcoCash, which boasts close to 10 million registered users.

Beyond building businesses, Masiyiwa has been a relentless champion of African dignity and self-determination on the global stage. He currently serves on the boards of Unilever PLC, Netflix Inc., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Geographic Society, and sits on global advisory councils including Bank of America and the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. Over the years he has played leading roles on several other prominent pan-African and international boards, including The Rockefeller Foundation and Morehouse College. He was selected by Fortune Magazine to its 'World's 50 Greatest Leaders' list in both 2017 and 2021, and was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.

A graduate in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Cardiff University, Masiyiwa holds honorary doctorates from Stellenbosch, Yale, Morehouse, Nelson Mandela University, and Cardiff University. His accolades include the World Food Prize Borlaug Medallion (2019), the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard (2024), and the prestigious Spear's Entrepreneur of the Year Award (2022). In 2025, he and his wife Tsitsi received the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award and were recognised by Time Magazine as Time100 Philanthropy honourees; he was also named to Time's list of the Top 100 Most Influential People in AI — a recognition of his accelerating pivot toward artificial intelligence.

That AI pivot is rapidly defining the next chapter of his career. In September 2025, Masiyiwa unveiled plans to establish Africa's first AI factories through Cassava Technologies — a US$605 million investment to build five artificial intelligence facilities across South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Morocco. In November 2025, Cassava launched Africa's first GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) at the Africa Tech Forum and announced a landmark partnership with Google to deploy Gemini across Africa using Cassava's AI factories. The same month, the company unveiled the Cassava AI Multi-Model Exchange (CAIMEx), a new platform giving African enterprises access to frontier AI systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — positioning the continent not as a passive consumer of imported technology, but as an active producer in the global AI economy.

Masiyiwa's public service during crises has been equally defining. He served for nearly two years as an African Union Special Envoy for COVID-19 response, heading the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team that procured vaccines for the continent — an arduous journey he undertook despite having no prior public-health mandate. When cholera struck Zimbabwe in 2019, he and his wife donated US$10 million to help contain the disease and availed a further US$60 million for building resilience against it. In January 2020, he agreed to pay striking Zimbabwean doctors a subsistence allowance of about US$300 per month and provide them with transport to work. He now serves as a Special Advisor to African Presidents on the US-Africa Leadership Summit initiative on food security.

A devout Christian and one of Africa's most consequential philanthropists, Masiyiwa is a member of the Bill Gates and Warren Buffett initiative known as the Giving Pledge. Together with his wife Tsitsi — co-founder of Higherlife Foundation and Delta Philanthropies — he has provided scholarships to more than 250,000 young Africans over the past two decades, with the foundation now having supported over 350,000 scholarships through Higherlife Foundation and Delta Philanthropies, led by Tsitsi and their eldest daughter Elizabeth Tanya. The foundation pays school fees for some 30,000 students annually in Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Burundi, and the Zimbabwean scholarship programme — named after the late Vice President and nationalist Joshua Nkomo, the man who helped Econet Zimbabwe acquire its operating license — caters for A-level and tertiary students in local institutions.

It would take a book to chronicle the full sweep of the Masiyiwas' philanthropic works and business ventures — indeed, Masiyiwa himself authored 'How to Build a Multi-Billion Dollar Business in Africa From Scratch', in which he immortalised his longtime counsel Tawanda Nyambirai, writing: 'Over the years, I have had the privilege to work with great lawyers from all around the world; but I say this with humility, Tawanda Nyambirai has one of the finest legal minds I have ever met.' He is an avid environmentalist who, together with Sir Richard Branson, founded the Carbon War Room, and he supports a diverse range of health causes including campaigns against HIV/AIDS, cervical cancer, malnutrition, Ebola, and, more recently, COVID-19.

Throughout it all, Masiyiwa has anchored his worldview in faith. As he once put it: 'Christianity is a value system that calls on me to be compassionate, it calls on me to help the weak. I generate a lot of money for me and my shareholders and people who have been associated with me, but that cannot be an end in itself.' That conviction — that wealth creation must serve a purpose larger than itself — is the thread connecting every chapter of his life, from a boy selling chewing gum in Kitwe, to the engineer who beat a state monopoly in court, to the billionaire now building Africa's first AI factories.

Today, Strive Masiyiwa stands proudly and deservedly enshrined on the Zimbabwe Digital Wall of Fame as a true ZimLegend. As a telecommunications pioneer who connected a continent, a technology visionary now shaping Africa's artificial-intelligence future, a philanthropist who has educated hundreds of thousands of young Africans, and a global business statesman who has carried Zimbabwean excellence onto the world's most influential boards, he exemplifies the very highest pinnacle of Zimbabwean entrepreneurial genius, purpose-driven leadership, and pan-African ambition — walking down memory lane with us, lest we forget.

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