Alibaba and Yahoo Founders Give Push to African Entrepreneurs at African Business Heroes Summit 2025 in Rwanda
On 13 December 2025, Alibaba Founder Jack Ma and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang paid a visit to Rwandan President Paul Kagame. The two business leaders were in Kigali to attend the 7th African Business Heroes Grand Finale 2025 (#ABH2025), which took place in Kigali from 12 to 13 December 2025. The semi-final was held in Dakar, Senegal, in September 2025.
As a reminder, the ABH was created by the Jack Ma Foundation in 2019 and aims to support and celebrate African entrepreneurship. Since its inception, the ABH has provided grants, mentorship, and global exposure to budding African entrepreneurs to create a positive socio-economic impact.
Finalists across Africa had the opportunity to pitch their venture to a panel of judges, which included Jerry Yang for this edition. The co-founder of Yahoo took to the stage to share his personal experience in creating and developing one of the most famous web portals, Yahoo.com. The top ten finalists across Africa compete for a share of USD 1.5 million in funding.
Diana Orembe, co-founder of NovFeed, won the competition and received USD 300,000 as a grant. NovFeed is a Tanzanian biotech startup that converts food waste into fish feed and organic fertilizer, while contributing to sustainability.
Abraham Mbuthia, founder of Uzapoint in Kenya, was first runner-up and received USD 250,000 for developing a mobile and web-based Point-Of-Sale (#POS) software. The software is suitable for #SME or large corporations, with the possibility for seamless integration with the Enterprise Resource Planning (#ERP) backend.
The second runner-up was Adriann Kruger, founder of NuvoteQ in South Africa. NuvoteQ specialises in providing Electronic Research Record (#ERR) to support clinical and pharmaceutical research.
During #ABH2025, Chandee Zhuang, Co-Founder and Senior Advisor of the Alibaba Global Initiatives, announced the launch of the Entrepreneur Training Platform, in collaboration with the Digital Lion Program. The online Platform will deliver clearly structured and easily accessible courses to entrepreneurs across Africa. The training covers financial management, leadership skills, operational efficiency, and digital preparedness, amongst the skills needed by entrepreneurs.