Paula Ingabire
Rwanda’s Minister of ICT & Innovation
Rwanda’s Minister of ICT and Innovation, architect of the country’s national AI policy, who hosted Africa’s first Global AI Summit in Kigali and argues the continent must build homegrown AI rather than watch from the sidelines.
In her words
Who would know our problems better than us? Technology should solve specific problems, not exist for its own sake.
If we do not equip our young people with skills to leverage these technologies, we risk creating a generation disconnected from the opportunities we provide.
Biography
Paula Ingabire (born 1985) is an engineer-turned-minister who has become one of Africa’s most influential technology policymakers. As Rwanda’s Minister of ICT and Innovation she has driven the small country’s outsized ambition to be a continental tech hub, and in 2025 she was named to the TIME100 AI list for that work.
Africa’s AI seat at the table
Ingabire shepherded Rwanda’s national AI policy — one of the first in Africa, complete with ethical guidelines to address bias in training data — and in April 2025 hosted the inaugural Global AI Summit on Africa in Kigali. The summit produced a continental AI declaration and launched a Rwanda AI Scaling Hub, backed by the Gates Foundation, to adapt AI for African healthcare, agriculture, and education. Her framing throughout: Africa should be a maker of AI, not merely a market for it.
Do we see an opportunity for technology to respond to our needs? And the answer is always yes.
She insists innovation and regulation must coexist rather than compete, and stresses skills as the precondition for benefit — warning that without training, young Africans will be locked out of the opportunities the technology creates. Her stance is emphatically pro-AI, filtered through a development lens: partnerships, risk-taking, and solutions built for the continent’s own problems.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/paula-ingabire