For the second consecutive year, Africa has a significant presence on TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people shaping the future of giving. The 2026 TIME100 Philanthropy list includes Tony and Awele Vivien Elumelu and Alice Kang’ethe, Mohammed Dewji, and Idris Elba and Sabrina Dhowre Elba from the diaspora.
Across Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya and the African diaspora, the honourees represent a range of causes, entrepreneurship, maternal health, food security, youth opportunity, and a range of methods.
What they share is a commitment to using private resources for public benefit, at scale, on a continent where that work remains unfinished.
Tony Elumelu and Awele Vivien Elumelu – Nigeria
Tony Elumelu has appeared on TIME’s radar before, as a 2020 TIME100 honouree, a 2022 TIME100 Impact Award recipient, and a contributor to this year’s main TIME100 list, where he wrote the profile of Aliko Dangote.
His inclusion on the philanthropy list, alongside his wife, Dr Awele Vivien Elumelu, is recognition of a different body of work: the Tony Elumelu Foundation, which has provided seed grants of $5,000 and mentorship to more than 27,000 entrepreneurs across Africa, well beyond the foundation’s original $100 million commitment.
Elumelu’s guiding philosophy, Africapitalism, the conviction that the continent’s private sector must lead its own transformation, shapes everything the foundation does.
Awele Elumelu is a medical doctor and healthcare executive who chairs Avon Healthcare Limited and Avon Medical Practice. Her work expanding access to healthcare and insurance in Nigeria represents the quieter half of a philanthropic enterprise that is, in practice, one of the largest entrepreneurship platforms on the continent.
Mohammed Dewji – Tanzania
Born in Singida, Tanzania, he grew up inside the MeTL Group, the family conglomerate he would eventually expand into one of East Africa’s largest businesses.
His time as a Member of Parliament for Singida put him in direct contact with the material conditions philanthropy is meant to address: weak schools, unsafe water, limited healthcare, and shallow local economies.
The Mo Dewji Foundation, established in 2014, works across education, healthcare, water access and climate action.
In 2016, Dewji signed the Giving Pledge, committing to direct at least half of his wealth, which was estimated at over $2 billion, to philanthropy.
Alice Kang’ethe – Kenya
The work Alice Kang’ethe leads addresses one of the most persistent failures in global health: women and babies dying from causes that health systems already know how to prevent. Every day in 2023, 700 women died from childbirth; 70% of those deaths happened in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.
As chief executive of the Beginnings Fund, based in Nairobi, she coordinates philanthropic capital with African governments to strengthen maternal and newborn health workforces, scale affordable clinical interventions and improve data and referral systems.
The fund is working to prevent more than 300,000 avoidable deaths and improve care for 34 million women and newborns by 2030 across 10 countries, including Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe.
The Beginnings Fund also works to address workforce shortages resulting from U.S. funding cuts and to scale innovations such as point-of-care ultrasound machines.
Idris Elba and Sabrina Dhowre Elba – African Diaspora
Idris Elba is best known for the roles he has played on screen. However, the work TIME has recognised belongs to a different stage.
Born in London to a Sierra Leonean father and a Ghanaian mother, Elba has built the Elba Hope Foundation alongside his wife, Sabrina Dhowre Elba, a Canadian-born philanthropist and activist of Somali descent who serves as a UN Goodwill Ambassador for IFAD.
Together, they have directed the foundation toward food security, youth opportunity and sustainable development, with particular attention to the communities their own roots connect them to.
The foundation’s Rice for Life programme has helped provide a million meals; its Creative Futures programme works with underserved young people.
Sabrina’s lens, shaped in part by her mother’s work on water access and women’s welfare in Somalia and Eastern Africa, runs through the foundation’s approach to rural and climate-vulnerable communities.
2025 TIME100 Philanthropy Honorees
The TIME100 Philanthropy list was officially introduced and launched in 2025. It drew honourees from 28 countries, and four of the entries were African.
Aliko Dangote – Nigeria
Copyright by World Economic Forum / Jakob Polacsek
Aliko Dangote is most commonly discussed as a businessman — the founder of Dangote Group and, for years, the wealthiest person on the African continent.
TIME’s 2025 recognition placed a different part of his biography in the light.
In 2014, Dangote endowed the Aliko Dangote Foundation with $1.25 billion, making it one of the largest private philanthropic commitments in African history.
The foundation spends an average of $35 million a year across health, education, economic empowerment, disaster relief and food security.
Its specific programmes include a $100 million multi-year effort to treat children with severe acute malnutrition, large-scale rice distribution across Nigeria, vaccine work that contributed to the country’s progress against polio, and a $10 million donation to Aliko Dangote University of Science and Technology.
Strive Masiyiwa and Tsitsi Masiyiwa – Zimbabwe
Strive Masiyiwa built Econet into one of Africa’s most recognisable telecommunications businesses.
Together, Stive and Tsitsi have spent nearly three decades directing private wealth toward the children and communities that markets tend to leave behind. Their HigherLife Foundation, launched in 1996, began with orphaned children and grew into a platform that has supported more than 250,000 people through scholarships and leadership training.
Their Delta Philanthropies, founded in 2017, extended the work further — $100 million invested in job creation, $60 million in healthcare and crisis response, with reach across education, rural entrepreneurship and disaster relief throughout Africa.
Yousriya Loza-Sawiris – Egypt
Yousriya Loza-Sawiris has been involved in philanthropy for more than forty years.
The matriarch of one of Egypt’s wealthiest families, she formalised her philanthropic practice in 2001 with the founding of the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development — an institution that has since invested more than $65 million across more than 150 projects, reaching over one million people.
The foundation’s work spans economic empowerment, social inclusion, education, and arts and culture.
