A Kenyan entrepreneur behind an app that translates speech into sign language has won Africa’s biggest award for engineering innovation. The UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering awarded the 2025 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation – the largest dedicated engineering prize in Africa – to Elly Savatia of Kenya for his sign language translation app, Terp 360.
Savatia was awarded £50,000 ($67,000) on October 16 by the academy for winning its top Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, which recognizes entrepreneurs who have developed technology to address challenges on the continent.
Savatia’s Terp 360 is an AI-powered app that translates speech into sign language using 3D avatars. It provides sign language translations from speech in real time, enabling users to communicate without the need for human interpreters. Its aim is to cater to interpreter shortages and improve accessibility in classrooms, workplaces and public services in Kenya.
“To go to the workplace, education, health care, you have to communicate,” said Savatia to CNN. “But the deaf community, they’re left behind.”
Since human sign language interpreters are expensive and are very few, several deaf people across Africa lack access to higher education, Savatia said. A government bill earlier this year demanded Kenyan employers to reserve at least 5% of jobs for people with disabilities. Still, many deaf people are not able to fit into several roles offered.
“Companies cannot afford interpreters… [and] they just don’t have the tools to effectively integrate these people,” said Savatia. “We see ourselves as an enabler. We are able to do sign language, but at scale.”
The Kenyan innovator developed Terp 360 with deaf and hard-of-hearing Kenyans to record over 2,300 signs that include phrases and words widely used in the country. Motion sensors were attached to the hands of a signer to capture the movements of their hands in space, CNN explained.
There are similar apps like Savatia’s, but they are not developed with African sign languages to ensure cultural relevance, he said. With over 300 sign languages in use all over the world, and around 30 in Africa, Terp 360 currently translates from English and Swahili into Kenyan Sign Language. It hopes to translate from other African and global languages in the future and is already working on translating from Rwandan, Ugandan, South African, British and American languages by mid-2027.
The $67,000 received from the Royal Academy of Engineering will support the next phase of Terp 360, Savatia said.
His app was selected from four finalists across Africa by a panel of seven judges at a ceremony held in Dakar, Senegal.
“The Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation is a way for us to support, showcase and celebrate African innovation,” said Rebecca Enonchong, chair of the prize-judging panel.
“What really stood out about Elly’s solution, and Elly himself, is the level of innovation,” she said. “It was really a demonstration that Africans are able and capable of using cutting-edge technology to solve problems, not just on the continent but beyond.”
