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In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Happy last day of August. It sure feels like we sped through August. Now, September is almost here. What has been your favourite African tech story so far this year? With one month left in Q3, what are you still looking forward to? Click “Reply” and write back to us. Let’s dive in. Become smarter about tech and commerce in Francophone Africa, and the policies shaping them. Read previous editions here first and subscribe below. Subscribe New wine, old wineskins Terra Industries appoints ex-Palantir exec Mozambique creates AI forum JSE suspends tech firm Labat Africa World Wide Web 3 Job Openings Features New wine, old wineskins? Image Source: Reuters Finally, Nigeria is investing in assistive technology for people with disabilities, something the disability community has been clamouring for. At its fourth Hackathon Live Show in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the telecom regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), challenged 20 innovators to build solutions under the theme “Technology Without Barriers.” Their ideas included AI-powered speech-to-text, real-time sign language translation, voice-enabled complaint systems, accessible customer care services, image-to-voice navigation, and inclusive employment platforms. Between the lines: It is a welcome development. But there is a problem: many of the digital platforms these technologies are meant to help people access remain inaccessible. Nigeria already has standards for building accessible government websites. The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA)’s guidelines require government institutions to provide equal access to information and functionality and to adopt the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Yet repeated audits have found accessibility problems across government websites; in June 2025, TechCabal published an investigation documenting similar barriers on banking, fintech, e-commerce, and other digital platforms. This raises a bigger question about Nigeria’s approach to digital inclusion. Assistive technologies can solve barriers that require specialised solutions, but they cannot replace accessibility built into the original product. A screen reader, for instance, can only interpret what a website makes available to it. Zoom out: As Nigeria builds new tools to help people navigate the digital world, perhaps it also needs to fix the world those tools are being built to navigate. Our reporter John Adoyi wrote a deep dive on this; read it here. Every business owner needs to watch this. The business questions you Google, answered by experts. Watch for free. Startups Nigerian defence-tech startup Terra Industries taps ex-Palantir executive Image Source: Tenor Terra Industries, the Nigerian defence-tech startup that recently closed a $52 million seed round, announced last Friday, splitting Twitter users between fierce criticism and enthusiastic praise for a company that doesn’t seem to be short on surprise announcements. On Friday, August 28, its chief executive officer and cofounder Nathan Nwachuku said on the social media platform that former Palantir director Todd Stiefler was joining the defence-tech startup as Director of Commercial. Explain like I’m new here: Terra builds autonomous security systems for critical infrastructure, including power plants, mines, and other assets that governments and companies need to keep running. Stiefler’s job will be to help turn that technology into a bigger commercial business, particularly among companies operating critical infrastructure across the Global South. His background makes the appointment interesting. Before Terra, Stiefler was a Vice President of Enterprise at WHOOP, a US-based fitness and wearable tech company, and worked in business development at Palantir, where he helped build go-to-market teams around its Apollo and FedStart platforms for defence and dual-use technology companies. Why now? Terra has just raised one of the biggest seed rounds in African tech this year, opened a London office, and is expanding manufacturing in Ghana. The company says its systems have already been used to protect about $11 billion worth of nationally critical assets across several African countries. That is a lot of momentum for a company still at the seed stage, and it helps explain why its moves are drawing strong reactions online. Zoom out: Stiefler’s appointment suggests Terra is entering its next phase. The question is not whether African-built defence technology can work; Terra seems to be proving it with domain expertise and an experienced board. But the company seems to be aggressively building and expanding its commercial flywheel, targeting institutions and likely governments. A survey for Nigeria’s health logistics buyers. If you’re a Health Logistics Buyer in Nigeria, participate in our report by filling out the survey by 4 September. It takes less than 10 minutes. Emerging Tech Mozambique is building the institutions it needs to have a say in its AI future Image Source: Tenor It’s easy to think of an AI ecosystem as startups building chatbots and researchers training models. But before any of that scales, countries need institutions figuring out how the technology should be built, funded, regulated, and used. Mozambique has taken a step in that direction with the launch of the Mozambican Association of Artificial Intelligence (AMIA) in Maputo, its capital city. Explain like I’m new here: AMIA will assemble government institutions, companies, universities, researchers, entrepreneurs, and civil society working on AI. Its goal is to encourage research, skills development, collaboration, and the adoption of AI solutions that fit Mozambique’s needs. A local association could also provide policymakers with a forum to hear from people building the technology before rules are written. Catch up: Mozambique’s push to build an artificial intelligence ecosystem did not start with the AMIA. In 2025, the government began work on a national artificial intelligence strategy with support from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In March 2026, it created a National Artificial Intelligence Commission to guide the technology’s development and regulation, while also working with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN body, on an artificial intelligence regulatory sandbox, a controlled environment for testing AI systems and regulatory approaches. AMIA is another piece of that broader effort. Zoom out: Mozambique is not alone in figuring out how to regulate AI—at least in Africa—ethically and beneficially. Kenya has a new framework that demands
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The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) recently challenged young innovators to build technology for people with disabilities. At its fourth Hackathon Live Show, held in Abuja on August 26 and 27, 2026, contestants developed solutions under the theme “Technology Without Barriers.” The solutions included AI-powered speech-to-text, real-time sign language translation, voice-enabled complaint systems, accessible customer care services, image-to-voice navigation and inclusive employment platforms. Some of the barriers faced by people with disabilities require specialised technology to overcome. But the hackathon comes against a problem Nigeria has been documenting for years: many of the digital platforms people are expected to use remain inaccessible. The scale of that problem matters. The National Commission for Persons with Disabilities (NCPWD) estimates that about 35 million Nigerians are persons with disabilities. For this population, an inaccessible digital platform can become a barrier to applying for jobs, accessing financial services, registering for education, obtaining identification or using government services that are increasingly delivered online. The inaccessible accessibility benchmark Nigeria is not without standards. The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA)’s Standards and Guidelines for Government Websites say government websites “shall provide equal access to information and functionality to all users.” The guidelines require government institutions to adopt the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and state that accessibility-related applications and downloads should be tested to ensure they work with assistive technologies. NITDA’s regulatory framework describes its published standards and guidelines as minimum benchmarks for the development and implementation of information technology in Nigeria, and says the agency monitors compliance with them. In July 2024, Communications Minister Bosun Tijani announced a plan to create a national web design system for ministries, departments, and agencies, including guidance and code to help government institutions build accessible websites. The project later became the Nigeria Web Design Standards initiative, developed with NITDA and the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation. When the project was launched in July 2025, Tijani said a Web Design Standards Toolkit would be available within 8 to 10 weeks for public feedback before moving through NITDA’s rule-making process and Federal Executive Council approval. But in August 2026, FIJ reported that the promised toolkit could not be found publicly, and that it found no publicly available evidence that a final standards document had received FEC approval or that the standards had begun to be implemented across government agencies. I checked NITDA’s current public resources, the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy’s published materials, and publicly available information on the Nigeria Web Design Standards project. I also could not find the promised toolkit or evidence of its rollout. At the same time, the ministry’s 2025 Year in Review still lists the launch of the Nigeria Web Design Standards as an achievement and states that the project established shared principles for accessibility, clarity, and consistency across Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs). The recurring, well-documented problem In July 2024, FIJ assessed the websites of all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory against NITDA’s government website guidelines. It found that 26 states had not complied with the guidelines, and 14 websites were deemed unusable for people with disabilities. FIJ found, among other problems, websites without text alternatives for images, making information inaccessible to some screen reader users. The problem is not confined to government websites. In June 2025, TechCabal’s investigation into digital accessibility found barriers across government portals, banks, fintechs, e-commerce platforms, telecoms, and other digital services. Users reported problems including unlabelled buttons, missing alternative text, inaccessible forms and poor screen reader compatibility. And the problem has not simply disappeared with time. A May 2026 TechCabal partner investigation of eight Nigerian public websites examined sites including the University of Lagos (UNILAG), the Lagos State University (LASU), the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), now known as the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), the Lagos State Government and the National Commission for Persons with Disabilities. It reported that none of the websites it audited had implemented what it described as baseline accessibility features. Assistive technology and its limits in solving accessibility This distinction matters because assistive technology and accessibility are not the same thing. I use screen readers such as JAWS and TalkBack to interact with digital platforms. They are not simply tools I prefer to use; they are what allow me to access much of the digital environment independently. They read the text, links, buttons and other elements that a website makes available to me, allowing me to navigate pages, fill out forms and complete tasks without seeing the screen. But a screen reader can only work with the information a website exposes to it. If an image has no useful alternative text, a button has no accessible name, or a form is badly structured, I may know that something is on the page without knowing what it does or how to use it. That is why accessibility needs to be considered at the level of the original product, not only through tools designed to work around it. Nigeria increasingly relies on biometric systems to access essential services, but they do not work equally well for everyone. In 2024, The PUNCH reported on the experiences of people with disabilities who struggled to obtain their National Identification Numbers (NINs) because fingerprint scanners could not capture their fingerprints. One man who had lost both hands said he could not obtain a NIN despite repeated attempts. Without one, he could not open a bank account or apply for a loan, so he resorted to using his son’s account for transactions. These experiences show that accessibility is not only about whether someone can navigate a website or application. It also affects the systems used to establish identity and authorise access to services. A service cannot be fully accessible if the authentication system required to use it excludes the people it is supposed to serve. The distinction is important for the NCC’s hackathon. Some of the solutions being developed by its contestants address problems that genuinely require specialised
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In March 2023, Adewale Adekomaiya lay trapped in a mangled car in Lagos while passersby filmed and a bystander tried to rob him. That near-death experience shattered his assumption that travel could wait for “later.” Within months, the Senior QA Architect and his wife packed their lives into a €900 ($1,048) digital nomad visa to Malta, spending two years working remotely across seven European countries. Now back in Nigeria with a newborn son, Adekomaiya tells JOHN ADOYI about the true costs of constant mobility, navigating racism abroad, and why his family’s next journey is taking them across Africa. Passers-by stood around the wreckage and filmed. Adewale Adekomaiya was trapped in a car in Yaba, a neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2023, just months after getting married. No one came to help. The only person who approached, Adekomaiya said, was trying to rob him. As he waited for help that didn’t seem to come, his thoughts wandered somewhere else: to his new wife, and to all the things they had planned to do together. Adekomaiya’s car was involved in an accident in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2023. Image Source: Adewale Adekomaiya. “I just got married,” he told TechCabal. “If I had died, I would have just gone without experiencing the world with my wife.” Until then, Adekomaiya had treated life as something to be enjoyed later. He would work and save, thinking he would eventually have the time and money to see the world. The fateful accident made “later” feel less certain. Within months, he and his wife had left Nigeria for Malta, where they built a life around remote work and travel. Two years later, after returning home for the birth of their son, Adekomaiya is preparing to leave again. This time, he wants his child to see the world with him. From IT support to remote work Adekomaiya’s career in tech started with helping other people use computers. He worked in IT support at Great Nigeria Insurance, an insurance underwriting and financial advisory firm, where he helped his colleagues resolve computer problems, according to him. Soon after, he returned to school to get a degree. In 2018, someone introduced him to quality assurance (QA), a field in tech that allowed him to combine his IT experience with the programming knowledge he had picked up as a support tech specialist. “I was able to merge that with my little knowledge of programming,” he said. Adekomaiya has worked in QA ever since, eventually becoming a senior engineer in the field. Today, he works as a QA architect. By the time he and his wife decided to leave Nigeria, he was working for a US company, which meant he could take his job with him. That flexibility would become important when the couple began figuring out how to turn their idea of travelling into an actual life outside Nigeria. Why Malta? Adekomaiya did not simply choose Malta because it had always been on his bucket list of places to travel to. Rather, the country offered an easy route for him and his wife to begin their nomadic life as far back as 2023. Portugal was also on his mind, but its embassy in Lagos was closed when they were making their plans, he said. Meanwhile, Malta had a digital nomad visa that Adekomaiya could apply for from home. He needed to show that he met the minimum income requirement and worked for a company outside the European Union (EU). Since he was working remotely for a United States-based company, he already had the documents to support his application. The process suited him because it did not require the kind of repeated embassy visits he wanted to avoid. “I hate stress when it comes to all this application of trying to apply for visas and the like,” he said. “But for this one, I saw that we could do the whole application from the comfort of the house.” Adekomaiya said the Malta application cost him about €300 ($350) per person—for himself and his wife—in 2023. A dependent attracted an additional €300 ($350), putting the couple’s application costs at €600 ($700); additional costs, including primary health insurance, which was a mandatory requirement for applicants, took the total package to €900 ($1,048), according to Adekomaiya. Malta visa applicants also had to meet a minimum income requirement, which he said was about an additional €2,000 ($2,330) at the time. Insurance was another requirement. Applicants had to provide an insurance contract covering a year and renew it annually. Adekomaiya and his wife opted for coverage that included outpatient treatment, which does not require hospital admission, and inpatient treatment, which covers care requiring a hospital stay. The plan also included Schengen coverage in case they needed medical attention while travelling to another country, according to Adekomaiya. Adekomaiya found a step-by-step guide online that made the application easier and helped him put the required documents together. In 2023, the application worked out, and Adekomaiya and his wife moved to Malta. Adekomaiya and his wife visited a small island near Malta, Gozo. Image Source: Adewale Adekomaiya. The couple spent about $2,400 on their flights from Nigeria to Malta, partly because they booked late, Adekomaiya said. When they arrived in Malta, they initially rented an Airbnb, a short-let apartment, for about two weeks, paying between €100 ($116.50) and €120 ($140) a night before moving into a three-bedroom apartment. The apartment cost between €900 ($1,048) and €1,200 ($1,400) a month, with one of the rooms serving as his workspace, he noted. Two years on the move Malta became Adekomaiya and his wife’s home base, but they did not spend all two years between 2023 and 2025 there. The couple used the island as a base for exploring Europe. They travelled to Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and the UK, visiting cities including Milan, Barcelona, and Madrid, according to Adekomaiya. They also went to Tenerife, the most populous island in Spain’s Canary Islands region. For the newly married couple, the appeal
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