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Most people who grew up with doctor parents either follow the medical path or reject it entirely. Joshua Adewolu did neither. Raised in Benin City, the Edo State capital, southern Nigeria, with an elder brother who studied medicine, he spent his childhood as the one person in the house who could not keep up with the medical conversations. “I was the odd one out, not understanding what was being communicated,” Adewolu says. For a while, the path seemed obvious: medicine. But in 2009, his interests shifted. “I told my parents that I would rather be the one to make the devices that you use to treat people,” he recalls. “That was the beginning of my career”. He completed his secondary education in 2013, and in the same year, enrolled at Afe Babalola University (ABUAD), a private university in Ekiti State. He chose to study Mechatronics Engineering, a multidisciplinary field combining mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering. “There were only two universities in Nigeria that were offering the course— Afe Babalola University and one other university,” he says. Real systems, real stakes In 2016, in his third year as a student, Adewolu secured a three-month internship, the student work experience program (SWEP), which was a mandatory part of his program. He interned at Sidmach Technologies, a Nigerian IT-solutions company that was in charge of designing the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) portal. “I was working on some of the screens and the user interface,” Adewolu recalls. “That was my first real tech role.” At Sidmach, he learnt more about programming languages such as Java and C#. His next internship demanded something different entirely—not screens and interfaces, but physical systems, buildings, and the infrastructure that keeps them running. In 2017, during his fourth year in the university, he undertook a six-month student industrial work experience scheme (SIWES), a mandatory program designed to bridge the gap between classroom theory and practical workplace skills. He said he interned at Chrema Technologies, a Lagos-based firm specialising in building automation and security systems. At Chrema, the work was hands-on in a way that textbooks and lecture notes in schools rarely are. “I remember I was part of a team of three that was responsible for installing a smart access control technology in Reckitt Benckiser [a consumer goods company],” Adewolu says. “I was also involved in the installation of building management technologies at Guaranty Trust Bank, which had a contract with Chrema Technologies to install some building management systems like thermometers”. On one installation at Reckitt Benckiser, he recalls his team spent an entire day troubleshooting fingerprint scanners that had faults, and eventually resolved the issue that night. “It really showed me perseverance on the job,” he says. Apart from learning perseverance, Adewolu overcame his dislike for heights at Chrema. He says he was assigned with some colleagues to install CCTV cameras at a hangar at the domestic wing of Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos. “I needed to get on a cherry picker to go all the way to the roof of the hangar to install the cameras,” he says. “It was very nerve-wracking at first, but after two times I got used to it.” Thanks to both internships, he came to understand the structure of a large organisation and the hunger of a smaller one. The experience, he says, gave him a sense of how the real world of engineering actually runs. “At Sidmach, I only knew what was happening in my division and didn’t really have close relationships with the senior leadership. At Chrema, I got to know how the whole organisation was doing,” Adewolu recounts. After completing the internships, Adewolu returned home to Edo State in 2017. Back at his father’s Life Hospital, he watched doctors press Pinard horns—trumpet-shaped tubes—against the bellies of pregnant women, counting foetal heartbeats the old-fashioned way, by ear and by patience. “We are now in the gadget world,” he says. “I was determined that I was going to innovate this process.” He then started building. Adewolu started his undergraduate research on an Internet of Things (IoT) device for foetal heart rate monitoring, which was supervised by one of his lecturers in school. “With all the knowledge I gained from studying mechatronics, I designed a device,” he recalls. In 2018, he developed a prototype of the device. The handheld tool read a foetus’s heartbeat and transmitted the data and visual graphs to the cloud, allowing authorised medical personnel to monitor clinical data remotely. “I got all the knowledge from Sidmach [when] designing web portals,” he admits. According to Adewolu, the device was tested on five women at Life Hospital. He would go on to publish his findings in a co-authored 2022 research paper, “Performance Evaluation of an IoT-Based Fetal Heart Monitoring Device.” Upon completing his bachelor’s degree in 2018, Adewolu was named the best graduating student in both the Mechatronics Engineering program and the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering. Building far from home By 2019, Adewolu’s academic record as best graduating student earned him a scholarship from the Stephen Oluwole Awokoya Foundation for Science Education, a Nigerian non-profit providing support for the postgraduate education of students with a record of academic excellence in the sciences. The scholarship funded his Master’s programme in Mechatronics and Robotics at New York University (NYU), a private research university in the United States. At NYU, he specialised in medical robotics and assistive mechatronics. Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and with it, a new obsession. The world was suddenly hyper-aware of coughs: of its presence, its absence, and what it sounded like. That collective anxiety translated into a research question: what if a device could learn to read a cough? Not just detect it, but classify it—distinguish a respiratory infection from the reflex of an irritated throat. He built a smart neckband that sat against the throat and listened, not to sound exactly, but to vibration. “It was a sole project under the supervision of one of the NYU professors that had taught me,”
Read MoreGoTyme Bank, the South African digital bank backed by billionaire Patrice Motsepe, has launched a long-term employee ownership programme for staff across the business, deepening its push to attract and retain fintech talent. The bank’s CEO Cheslyn Jacobs on Tuesday told TechCabal that employees are participating through a Long-Term Incentive Programme (LTIP) designed to align workers across the digital banking group with its long-term growth and success. “The programme gives qualifying employees the opportunity to participate in the value created over time and reflects our belief that the people building the business should share in its success,” he said. The move is part of a broader shift in South Africa’s fintech sector, where employee ownership is increasingly being used to attract and retain talent, moving beyond Silicon Valley-style perks. In a sector defined by aggressive growth, mounting competition and rising pressure to prove profitability, the digital race is increasingly about keeping the people building billion-dollar businesses invested in the outcome. As digital lenders mature and Initial Public Offering (IPO) ambitions come into focus, equity is fast becoming less of a Silicon Valley pay package and more of a strategic retention tool. Employee share ownership plans (ESOPs) have gained momentum in South Africa, benefiting more than 211,000 workers since 2019 and paying out about R3.3 billion ($201 million) in dividends, according to the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition. The department says telco giant Vodacom and Old Mutual are among the 98 ESOPs established in recent years, with another 27 underway. Similarly, Jacobs underlined that the employee shareholding scheme is intended to support long-term alignment, retention, and shared-ownership thinking across the organisation. Early reactions from employees suggest the programme is already reshaping how staff view their role within the digital bank. “Being shareholders has given us a whole new perspective on the business. We’re no longer simply contributing to GoTyme Bank’s growth; we’re sharing in it,” said Lindelani Nxumalo, a customer service representative. “That sense of ownership has made us more engaged, more committed, and even prouder to be part of the GoTyme Bank family.” For senior employees, the initiative is also reinforcing a sense of long-term purpose and belonging within the business. “It’s incredibly motivating to work at a company such as GoTyme Bank that sees employees as part of its long-term future,” said Lee-Anne Kalam, Head of Marketing. “Becoming a shareholder makes me feel trusted and valued, and reinforces the sense that we are all contributing to something meaningful together.” Crucially, the empowerment scheme, which extends participation to employees with more than six months’ tenure, reflects a broader evolution in how African fintechs think about incentives as they grow from startup disruptors into mature financial institutions. “We have reached a scale where it is important to deepen long-term alignment between employees, customers and shareholders. The programme was fundamentally created to reinforce our ownership culture and recognise the contribution employees are making to the company’s growth,” Jacobs said. While GoTyme is not disclosing how much of the business has been allocated to employees, Jacobs underlined that the LTIP was designed to allow workers to “participate in the value created over time” while strengthening retention and long-term alignment. The strategy reflects a growing reality in African fintech that digital talent has become one of the industry’s most valuable currencies. Across Africa, high-growth startups, banks and fintechs, including Lesaka, have joined established players such as Absa Bank and Capitec in experimenting with equity or share-linked incentives, though these programmes have often remained largely limited to senior executives. The timing is also notable for GoTyme, which serves more than 21 million customers across South Africa and the Philippines. The digital bank is targeting significant long-term growth and has publicly discussed the possibility of an eventual public listing. Although the Philippines remains GoTyme’s main growth engine due to its larger population and more mature scale, Jacobs said South Africa is punching above its weight, with strong customer adoption reinforcing its importance in the bank’s long-term expansion strategy despite a highly competitive banking market. Jacobs stopped short of linking the employee scheme directly to IPO ambitions, but noted that the bank was entering a more mature stage of growth. “The timing reflects the maturity and momentum of the business more than any single future event,” he said. “We are building for the long term.”
Read MoreTalksign, a Nigeria- and UK-based artificial intelligence (AI) research and product company, has launched two AI-powered models that enable real-time translation between American Sign Language (ASL) and text or speech. Palm 1.0 interprets ASL into text or speech with 84.2% semantic accuracy, while Echo 1.0 converts written or spoken language into photorealistic ASL video, generating avatars in real time with minimal delay. The two translators, launched on May 20, build on Talksign’s first foundation model, Talksign-1, introduced in February, which provided basic bidirectional communication by translating 250 ASL signs into speech or text and converting spoken or typed words into sign language video sequences. Talksign-1, however, was limited to isolated signs and could not interpret continuous sentences or fingerspelling, a limitation that Palm 1.0 and Echo 1.0 aim to overcome. The launch comes as part of a growing effort to address a global communication gap affecting millions of people with hearing loss. According to the World Health Organisation, over 430 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss, and tens of millions use sign language as their primary mode of communication. Most digital tools—from video conferencing platforms to public service kiosks—still assume users can hear and speak, creating barriers to everyday participation in society. Palm 1.0 is Talksign’s sign-to-text model, designed to translate ASL into written or spoken language in real time. The company said the model achieves 84.2% semantic accuracy, meaning it captures the intended meaning of a signer’s gestures, and 79.6% word-level accuracy, approaching fluency for a visual language that has historically lacked large-scale training data. It was trained on over 71,000 ASL samples and was built on a transformer-based architecture with a system called SAGE (Spatial Attention Graph Encoder), which tracks 133 anatomical landmarks on the body, including hands, head, and shoulders. According to Talksign, this allows Palm 1.0 to interpret signing as a continuous, contextual conversation rather than as isolated gestures. “Palm 1.0 is the first model we are confident putting into the hands of Deaf users at scale,” said Edidiong Ekong, Talksign’s CEO and co-founder. “The next step is putting it everywhere a Deaf person needs to communicate: on phones, smart glasses, in classrooms and hospitals.” The company said Echo 1.0, the second product, was trained on 94,410 ASL sentence pairs, running through the dataset 15 times to improve accuracy and fluency. It converts written or spoken language into ASL video using photorealistic avatars. The company said it outputs 30 frames per second video with translation latency of approximately 29 milliseconds, making the signing appear in real time. The model translates English text into ASL gloss, preserving ASL grammar and word order rather than producing a literal, word-for-word transcription. Each gloss token is then matched to a high-fidelity 3D motion sequence and rendered by a neural engine. Echo 1.0 also allows personalised avatars to be generated from a single reference photo, which the company said helps make signing feel natural. The translation process for Echo 1.0 operates in three stages: speech recognition or direct text input, conversion of English text to ASL gloss, and rendering of gloss tokens into photorealistic video. This workflow allows the model to produce fluent, visually coherent signing rather than a word-for-word transcription of English. Kazi Mahathir Rahman, Talksign’s co-founder and CTO, said the models also open the door to “signing as a first-class interface” for human-computer interaction, enabling new ways for Deaf users to interact with AI systems without relying on speech or keyboards. Talksign said the new models are intended for contexts where professional sign language interpreters are scarce or unavailable, including emergency alerts and live news broadcasts. The company said both models were trained on datasets reviewed with Deaf advisors, educators, and accessibility advocates. Landmark extraction occurs on the user’s device, meaning only processed data points—not raw video—are sent to company servers. The company acknowledged that both models currently have limitations. Echo 1.0 accepts only English input, with Spanish, French, and Arabic planned for future versions. Specialised vocabulary in fields such as medicine, law, and engineering requires additional fine-tuning, and multi-word ASL phrases are only partially modeled. Palm 1.0, while capable of sentence-level interpretation, is not yet optimised for all continuous signing contexts. Talksign said it plans to expand the models’ capabilities in upcoming versions, including support for additional sign languages such as British Sign Language, Deutsche Gebärdensprache, and Nigerian Sign Language. The company said the full rollout of Palm 1.0 and Echo 1.0 on the desktop app and Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses is scheduled for August 20, 2026. With the launch of the 2 products, Talksign joins other AI-powered accessibility platforms, including SignVrse, whose flagship product Terp 360 provides real-time translation of spoken language into sign language using a hyper-realistic 3D avatar, using artificial intelligence to reduce communication barriers for people with hearing impairments.
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