TEDxOsogbo

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Francis Odeyemi

  Founder of Ninthgrid

  Francis Odeyemi is a product and brand design leader and the founder of Ninthgrid, often called the "Shutterstock for Africa," a platform giving African photographers a way to earn from authentic, Afrocentric imagery while supplying brands with visual content that actually reflects the continent. Over more than a decade, he has built digital products across Nigeria, the UK, and the US, and is a Y Combinator Startup School alumnus with executive education from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Through Ninthgrid, he has watched firsthand what happens when an AI model is asked to picture Africa, and how little of the continent actually exists in the datasets shaping today's AI.

• Kemi Deborah Olakunle

  Social Entrepreneur and Founder of HealthVest

  Kemi Deborah Olakunle, known widely as Kemi the Changemaker, is a social entrepreneur with a background in Human Anatomy and advanced training in Public Health. She founded HealthVest, a health-tech venture whose flagship product, PreggiCare Wallet, helps women save toward pregnancy and childbirth while accessing discounted care. PreggiCare Wallet is one piece of her broader push for a Nigeria where quality healthcare isn't a privilege. She also leads the Art4Health Campaign and founded Changemakers Hub and Capital, which has trained and mentored over two thousand young people across multiple countries. Through the Solve Africa Fund, she's working to raise a million changemakers across Africa.

• Oluwatomi Olunuga

  Public Health Professional and Founder of Careers in Public Health

  Oluwatomi Olunuga is a public health and development professional with over nine years of experience advancing health, gender equality, and the rights of women and girls across Nigeria and beyond. She is the founder of Careers in Public Health, which has supported over 3,400 students and professionals through mentorship and career development, and of the MaleMatters Initiative, which engages men and boys as partners in gender equity. Her work with organizations including UNFPA, Women Deliver, and GSMA, alongside her current role at Helium Health, has earned her recognitions including the Diana Award and a place on She Leads Africa's Top 50 Rising Moguls list.

• Segun Solomon

  Founder and CEO of Madros Technologies

  Segun Solomon is the founder and CEO of Madros Technologies, where he leads IT consulting, digital skills development, and brand innovation across Nigeria. He also founded Tech Parrot, a technology media platform, and built the Madros Academy of Technologies into a training ground for thousands of young people entering the digital economy. Beyond his companies, Segun shapes policy as a member of the Technical Working Group under Nigeria's National Information Technology Development Agency and serves on the Osun State Advisory Board on Technology, Innovation, and Digital Economy.

• Sulaiman Adewale

  Founder of XaraAI

  Sulaiman Adewale is the founder of Xara, Africa's first AI-powered conversational banking assistant, built entirely inside WhatsApp. A self-taught software engineer from Osogbo, Osun State, he spent over a decade in software architecture before building Xara out of personal frustration: he found that even simple banking tasks meant fighting an interface that wasn't built for him. Rather than adapt to broken systems the way most of us quietly learn to, he asked what banking would look like with no interface at all, just a conversation, in whatever language a user already speaks, from Pidgin to Yoruba to Hausa. Launched in 2025, Xara now serves over sixty thousand users and has drawn interest from major financial and technology players, including xAI.