TEDxAccra

Speakers

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

• Ama Adi Dako-Seidu

  Digital Media Producer

  Ama is a storyteller, producer and writer passionate about using design, technology and media to transform the lives of Africans. As the host and co-founder of Big Fat African Development (“Bee-Fad”), she is building the largest citizen’s movement on the continent so we can solve Africa’s toughest problems together. Ama believes development is not rocket science, citizens need coordinated action to move bold ideas forward and BFAD can be that vehicle. Outside of BFAD, Ama is the Chief Content Officer for Afrotoons, an African animation studio bringing African stories for kids to a global audience. Her first job as a TA at Ashesi University shaped her philosophy for building Africa. It’s also where she met her co-founder and now husband, Kabiru. After Ashesi, she worked at TED in New York for 6 years across, MainStage Talks, TV, Audience Development and Social.

• Emmanuel Osei Ntim

  Serial Entrepreneur

  Emmanuel Osei Ntim leads FON Packaging Ventures, one of Ghana's leading corrugated carton manufacturers, and founded EON Investments. A proud Kwahu and the eldest of four brothers, he grew up inside the family business his parents built from a trading shop in Tudu, on the factory floor from the age of twelve. Educated at Ghana International School and Bryant University in Rhode Island, he was back at work in Accra within 48 hours of graduating. Under his leadership, the company grew from an internal supply solution into a manufacturer serving Nestlé, Wilmar and Olam. Today he writes and speaks on African industrialization and second-generation succession under the banner Manufacturing Africa Forward.

• Ibrahim Mahama

  Artist

  Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) is one of the most influential voices in contemporary art and the first African artist to top ArtReview’s Power 100. His practice centres on monumental, site-specific installations using materials of labour and trade - jute sacks, timber, and industrial remnants - to explore global economies, colonial histories, and the circulation of goods and people. Living and working between Accra and Tamale, he is the founder of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Red Clay Studio, and Nkrumah V olini. Mahama has exhibited internationally, including at Documenta 14, the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, and with a forthcoming solo exhibition at Fondation Cartier, Paris (2026). He is the recipient of the Prince Claus Award (2020), the Sam Gilliam Award (2024), and the Gold Award at the inaugural Art Basel Awards (2025). His work is held in major public collections worldwide, and he is represented by APALAZZOGALLERY and White Cube.

• Isaac Wiafe

  Professor of Information Technology

  Prof. Isaac Wiafe is a Professor of Information Technology at the University of Ghana and the Founder and Lead of the Human–Computer Interaction Lab, at the Department of Computer Science. He is an internationally engaged researcher, technology innovator and consultant working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, persuasive technologies, digital health, accessibility and speech, and language technologies for low-resource African languages. He has secured and led several competitive research grants from reputable institutions, including Google, UNICEF, MEST Africa and IDRC. His work combines frontier AI research with practical solutions to African challenges, including multilingual speech recognition and text-to-speech systems, impaired-speech technologies, maternal-health chatbots, culturally grounded content-moderation tools and open datasets for Ghanaian languages.

• Kabiru Seidu

  Multidisciplinary Designer

  Kabiru Seidu is a designer and strategist passionate about using thoughtful design and organised citizen action to address Africa’s development challenges. As co-founder and Director of Strategy and Design at Big Fat African Development (BFAD), he spearheads the projects of the BFAD Foundation, transforming ambitious ideas into practical initiatives that can be tested and implemented. His approach was first shaped at Ashesi University, where he studied and later worked, and where he was introduced to the power of design as a tool for transforming the continent. He later founded and led NubianVR and the Nubian Foundation, designing technology products and programmes living at the intersection of education, games and interactive media. Through this work, he collaborated with organisations including UNICEF and the Ghana Education Service and contributed to digital learning initiatives that reached more than 20,000 learners across Africa.

• Katya Osei

  Environmental Bioengineer, Researcher and Writer

  Katia Osei, also known as Katya the Destroyer, is a Ghanaian engineer, researcher, and storyteller working to democratize the "-isms" and "-ologies" long reserved for the privileged few. After studying bioengineering at Harvard University, she returned to Ghana's coastline, a historic site where many of the stories that shaped today's unequal world were first told. Her work spans genetic engineering to community ecology, bridging conventional academia and citizen scence. Katia believes that the world as we know it was first spoken into being and that new stories, told from this same coast, can help unbuild it into something fairer.

• Rachael Tachie-Menson

  Product leader and strategist; building products and strengthening technology ecosystems across Africa and the US.

  Rachael Tachie-Menson is a product leader, strategist and ecosystem architect who has spent nearly two decades building products and businesses at the intersection of technology, people and growth. Her career spans some of the world’s most influential technology companies, including Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn, Yahoo and WeWork, as well as startups across North America and Africa. She has built and scaled products from zero to one and led product portfolios across AI, marketplaces, B2B/SaaS and consumer technology. Today, Rachael is the Founder and Managing Partner of Author Digital Labs, a product strategy and growth studio that helps companies turn ambitious ideas into products people actually want, use, and pay for. Her work sits at the intersection of human psychology and behavior, systems and technology: understanding how people make decisions, how the systems around them shape those decisions, and how technology can be designed to create better outcomes.