TED Idea Search: Africa 2022 winners selected

Journalist Adeola Fayehun and TED curator Cloe Shasha Brooks host the TED Idea Search: Africa 2022 to discover new voices.

From April through June 2022, the TED Idea Search: Africa 2022 applications were open to anyone living in or descended from the African continent. Applicants were required to create a two-minute video as a part of their submission.

After sorting through hundreds of applications, the TED team selected ten finalists to participate in two virtual TED Membership events, where the finalists talked more about their ideas and participated in a Q&A with TED Members. After each Q&A, TED Members had the opportunity to vote on each finalist’s idea and speaking style.

Thanks to those ratings, the TED team selected three winners who will be invited to give a TED Talk, either virtually or in person. Those winners are:

Chinyanta Kabaso, dancer, based in Glasgow, Scotland

Kabaso studies the roots and meanings of traditional African dance styles and performs dances from across the continent of Africa.

Diarra Bousso Gueye, fashion designer and mathematician, based in Dakar, Senegal

Gueye uses mathematics to design clothing patterns and encourages her customers to vote on which designs are manufactured.

Laetitia Ky, artist and activist, based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Ky creates sculptures from her hair through an activist lens.

Why Africa?

TED is committed to a global mindset. We seek to source ideas from everywhere and to make them widely and freely accessible. Powerful ideas, expressed and distributed with care, can bring different groups together and create a shared vision of a future worth pursuing. It is with that global mindset that we are focusing on different regions of the world for several idea search events — most recently Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Past TED Idea Search winners:

Check out a selection of speakers who were discovered during past TED Idea Searches:

Adie Delaney: An aerialist on listening to your body’s signals

Adeola Fayehun: Africa is a sleeping giant — I’m trying to wake it up

Andrea Berchowitz: The link between menopause and gender inequity at work

Ariel Waldman: The invisible life hidden beneath Antarctica’s ice

Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle: What Saturn’s most mysterious moon could teach us about the origins of life

Leo Lanna and Lvcas Fiat: The colorful, shapeshifting wonder of the Amazon’s praying mantises

Miguel Antonio Modestino: How to transform the chemical industry — one reaction at a time

Tamekia MizLadi Smith: How to train employees to have difficult conversations

Zak Ebrahim: I am the son of a terrorist. Here’s how I chose peace

Richard Turere: My invention that made peace with the lions