Four Africans have been selected for MIT Technology Review's 2026 Global Innovators Under 35 List

MIT Technology Review released its 2026 "Global Innovators Under 35" list, and four African young people were selected

On September 8, MIT Technology Review released the 2026 "Innovators Under 35" list. The list selected 35 outstanding young scientists and entrepreneurs from nominations from nine countries. Among them, four are from Africa: Joseph Nguthiru of Kenya, Diana Orembe and Paschal Kija of Tanzania, and Loza Tadesse of Ethiopia.

This list has gone through 30 years. A total of 550 candidates were nominated this year. After strict review by 44 expert judges, these 35 winners were finally selected. Previous winners include Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Spotify's Daniel Ek, AMD CEO Lisa Su and AI researcher Ilya Sutskever, giving the list a strong track record of discovering early talent. This year's winners are distributed in four areas: artificial intelligence, computing and robotics, biotechnology, and climate and energy.

Meet four highly acclaimed African innovators

Joseph Nguthiru

28-year-old Joseph Ngutilu founded HyaPak. The inspiration came from his experience of being trapped for several hours when a large number of water hyacinth blocked the river while rafting on Lake Naivasha in Kenya. This invasive weed can clog waterways, consume oxygen in the water, and cause mass fish deaths in tropical areas.

HyaPak currently pays local fishermen to pick the plant, dry it, and extract cellulose for use in making biodegradable packaging materials, including sapling bags, agricultural product packaging and packaging for Kenya's flower export industry. The company is working with a German logistics company to develop materials and is in talks to license its technology in other countries. "We use free and fast-growing plants that are accessible to anyone," Ngutilu said in a personal profile at MIT."It's a way for us to reduce costs."

Diana Orembe

30-year-old Diana Orembe grew up in Tanzania and saw firsthand how local fish farmers, including her uncle, could not afford the cost of high-quality feed; some had to use rotten vegetables or chicken manure as replacements, which not only caused fish growth to stall, but also severely affected profits.

Her startup, NovFeed, collects food waste from local markets, such as potato peels, pineapple peels and expired fruits, and converts it into protein-rich feed pellets by fermentation with a mixture of specific microorganisms. This product is currently used by nearly 500 fish farmers and costs about 25% less than imported feed. The new factory opened in May this year has increased NovFeed's production capacity twenty-fold, and the company has also begun converting fermentation by-products into organic fertilizers. "In Tanzania, fish should be a cheap source of protein, but it's not," Orembe said.

Paschal Kija

Paschal Kija, 28, received medical training in Tanzania. There, postpartum hemorrhage remains one of the leading causes of maternal death. About 200,000 African women die each year from complications that are often manageable in well-resourced medical facilities.

His team once had a patient who traveled more than 60 miles for a blood transfusion but could not be rescued. In collaboration with medical school classmate James Kalema, Kia designed the "Mkanda Salama"(meaning "safe package"). It's a $70 belt made of elastic foam and medical-grade fabric with a manual pump that allows medical staff to apply and monitor abdominal compression. A 2023 study found that the device stopped postpartum bleeding in 73% of women within 20 minutes. His startup, Afya Lead, has deployed the product in 85 medical facilities in Tanzania and is conducting clinical trials with the United Nations Population Fund and major Tanzanian government health research institutions.

Loza Tadesse

Loza Tadesse, 34, is a special case in this group: She is an Ethiopian-born professor of mechanical engineering who currently teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While studying medicine in Ethiopia, she witnessed how a lack of basic diagnostic equipment, such as MRI or CT scanners, limited medical services in rural clinics. Since then, her laboratory has developed a sensor that can diagnose pneumonia through a simple breath test, and has developed SpectroGen, an AI tool that can generate multiple types of spectral readings from a single measurement, such as Raman spectroscopy, X-ray and infrared spectroscopy. In testing, SpectroGen's results were consistent with nearly 700 traditional laboratory measurements of mineral samples. "I can carry a simple instrument... that's the equivalent of carrying an entire large laboratory with me," Tadesse said.

What this list means for Africa

No Nigeria was included this year, which is noteworthy because the country often appears in similar global indices. Previous reports pointed out that Oluwasanmi Koyejo, a Stanford University professor born in Nigeria, is one of the three Africans to be included in the 2026 Time 100 AI list, along with winners from Senegal and Tunisia.

This year's four African winners present two very different models: one is to start businesses locally in Kenya and Tanzania to solve local problems; and the other is to expat researchers who advance research in elite overseas institutions, as Tadesse did at MIT. Both Ngutilu and Kia are working hard to expand their technology beyond their homeland, suggesting that this year's list may have far greater influence than the four winners themselves and radiate to the wider African continent.