Strive Masiyiwa (aka "Bill Gates of Africa") is a Zimbabwean businessman and cellphone pioneer, founding Econet Wireless.

Strive Masiyiwa was born in what was Southern Rhodesia in 1961. He went to High school in Scotland; he gained a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Cum Laude) at the University of Wales, returning to newly independent Zimbabwe in 1984, where he took a job with the state-owned telephone company. But he grew frustrated with the bureaucracy and formed his own engineering company. He applied for the country's first mobile-phone license yet had to fight all the way to the supreme court before he could connect his first subscribers in 1998.