Elemental Media is edited by Emeka Okafor, a two-decade builder of the institutions, networks, and language of African innovation.

Okafor directed TED Global Arusha in 2007 and TED Global 2017, the only full TED Conferences ever held in Africa. He co-founded the TED Fellows Program, helping build the selection and recruitment system behind more than 400 Fellows across the world. He also co-founded Maker Faire Africa, which ran from 2009 to 2014 across five countries and brought visibility, networks, and vocabulary to the continent's informal and formal production clusters.

Today, Okafor serves as Strategic Innovation and Technology Lead for UNDP's timbuktoo, the largest initiative in the world dedicated to the African innovation ecosystem, with stated targets of $10 billion in funding, 10,000 startups supported, 1,000 scaled, and 100 million jobs created. He sits on the executive board of the Gearbox Pan Africa Network and has advised founders, governments, and institutions across software, agro-processing, consumer goods, deep tech, and innovation policy.

A single thesis runs through his work: Africa's path runs through what he calls a culture of production. Elemental Media is where that framework is applied in real time, covering what is being built, by whom, with what capital, and against what constraints.