If Africa is to absorb its working-age population through to 2035, the continent needs roughly 18 million new jobs a year. Closing that gap requires industrial-scale manufacturing capacity paired with the productivity layer that turns labour into value. The Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize, now in its fifth round, is structured around exactly that bet.
The 2026 edition awarded its $1 million grand prize to Cameroon’s BleagLee earlier this month, naming AI in manufacturing as the focus area for the first time. Terry Mulligan, Director of Environmental and Social Innovation at the Milken Institute and a 15-year veteran of incentive-prize design, responded to tech.africa’s written questions about the structural gap the prize is built to close, why this year’s manufacturing focus matters, and what the 2026 finalist cohort says about where African AI deployment is actually happening today.
This Q&A has been lightly edited for brand conventions, house style and length. The structure of Mulligan’s answers is preserved.
How does the Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize drive scalable innovation in Africa?
Africa’s innovation ecosystem requires more than capital. It demands the infrastructure to transform promising ideas into scalable solutions. The Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize Program has emerged as a leading response, now recognised as the continent’s largest innovation prize, having engaged more than 13,000 innovators from 136 countries since its 2021 launch.
What distinguishes the programme is its integrated model. Recipients do not simply receive funding. They gain structured mentorship and direct access to global investors and industry leaders. Focus areas have been strategically selected to reflect Africa’s development priorities, spanning AgriTech, FinTech, green energy, and most recently, AI and manufacturing.
Equally significant is the programme’s commitment to accessibility. With no restrictions on age, background, or prior achievement, it is designed to ensure that opportunity reaches talent across the full breadth of the continent.
What structural gap does the Prize address in Africa’s innovation ecosystem?
The core problem we are solving is a structural one. Transformative innovation is happening all over the world, but the systems to find it, fund it, and scale it are not evenly distributed. Entrepreneurs in emerging and frontier markets are building real solutions to real problems, and many of them have the results to prove it. But they are often invisible to traditional funding ecosystems simply because of where they are, not because of the quality of their work.
The Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize Program is designed to change that. We evaluate entrepreneurs on the strength of their solution, their evidence of impact, and their potential to scale. Geography and proximity to established networks do not determine who gets a shot. That is the gap we are closing: not just access to capital, but access to visibility, validation, and the kind of platform that can genuinely change the trajectory of a company.
With Africa needing roughly 18 million new jobs a year through 2035, why does AI in manufacturing matter so much right now?
Manufacturing is how countries build real, lasting wealth: with jobs, stronger supply chains, and more value captured from their own resources. Pair that with AI, and the opportunity for Africa becomes genuinely exciting.
The question driving this year’s prize is practical: how do you apply AI to actual manufacturing challenges to improve productivity, cut waste, and make growth more inclusive? Not AI as a concept, but AI that works in the real world, in the hands of African entrepreneurs.
What makes Africa’s position so compelling is that it does not have to follow the same industrial path everyone else took. With the right technologies and investment, African manufacturers can build more sustainable, more inclusive production models from the start.
What stands out among this year’s finalists and grand prize winner?
This year’s finalists tell a clear story: AI being put to work on practical, real-world challenges with tangible economic and social impact across Africa. The group spans five countries, Cameroon, Rwanda, Tanzania, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, and the solutions they have built are remarkably varied.
You have Freshpack Technologies using AI-powered cold storage to cut food waste in rural and informal markets. Spiro making electric mobility affordable and scalable. Digitech Oasis automating warehouse and fulfilment operations through AI and robotics. And Toto Safi running a circular textile platform that empowers women-led cooperatives to produce reusable hygiene products.
And then there is our grand prize winner, BleagLee, which uses AI to transform plastic, e-waste, and agricultural waste into high-value materials like 3D printing filaments and bio-carbon. It is a powerful example of what this prize is looking for.
What strikes me about this group is that none of these are speculative technologies. These are companies already deploying AI at scale, solving real manufacturing and supply chain challenges right now. Together, they show exactly what we set out to find: innovators building more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient models of production with Africa at the centre.
Where the prize goes from here
The Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize launched in 2021 and has since become Africa’s largest innovation prize by participation, drawing entries from 136 countries. Earlier rounds focused on AgriTech, FinTech and green energy. Manufacturing is the prize’s fifth focus area, and the first to test how the integrated programme model performs in a domain where capital intensity, skills supply and infrastructure availability all play harder constraints than in pure software.
The Milken Institute and Motsepe Foundation have not yet announced the next focus area.
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