Zimbabwean digital policy leader Chenai Chair and Nigerian technology leader Hon. Dr. Bosun Tijani have been named among the 2026 Goalkeepers Champions by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The recognition highlights their work to ensure artificial intelligence expands opportunity and reduces inequality.
The 2026 Goalkeepers Champions are leaders, innovators, advocates and changemakers working across health, education, agriculture, technology, policy and culture. Their work focuses on making sure communities can benefit from AI while having a role in shaping how the technology is developed and used.
The Goalkeepers community brings together people working toward the 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development. Each year, the initiative recognises members making significant contributions to that effort.
Chenai Chair: Building More Inclusive AI
Chair, a Zimbabwean digital policy leader and feminist researcher, has spent more than a decade examining technology and digital power. She is recognised as an African Language AI Champion and Digital Rights Advocate for her work expanding African language datasets and promoting community-led digital rights.
More than 2,000 African languages are largely absent from current AI models. This creates a risk that millions of people could be excluded from information and opportunities offered by AI.
As Director of the Masakhane African Languages Hub, Chair leads a continent-wide effort to develop open-source AI datasets. The Hub, whose name means “we build together”, brings linguists, sociologists and local communities together to create language data from the ground up.
The work is aimed at enabling AI systems to operate in everyday African languages. Chair also promotes a human-centred approach in which language inclusion, gender equity and local skills are built into technology from the start.
Her approach places African communities at the centre of AI development. It also gives them a role as creators and decision-makers rather than simply users of technology developed elsewhere.
Bosun Tijani: Expanding Africa’s AI Capacity
Nigerian technology leader Hon. Dr. Bosun Tijani, the country’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, has also been named a 2026 Goalkeepers Champion. A technology entrepreneur and co-founder of pan-African innovation hub CcHUB, Tijani is focused on building Nigeria’s domestic AI capacity.
Through Nigeria’s National AI Strategy and the 3 Million Technical Talent programme, he is helping develop local technology skills. The programme has already trained nearly 300,000 young people to build datasets based on Nigerian realities.
Tijani is also supporting the development of a national AI scaling hub, with applications in health, agriculture and education. At the same time, Nigeria is expanding fibre-optic infrastructure to strengthen the digital systems needed to support these technologies.
He has argued that African countries need to move quickly on AI if they want to influence how the technology develops. His work places emphasis on giving local communities the skills and infrastructure needed to shape technology for their own needs.
Together, Chair and Tijani represent two different but connected approaches to equitable AI: making technology more inclusive through language and community participation, while building the infrastructure and talent needed for Africa to develop its own digital future.
