Accessibility · Ordinary People
The Kenyan engineer who built Africa's first AI sign-language translator after watching 300 deaf students share one interpreter
Elly Savatia · Nairobi, Kenya
Elly Savatia turned motion-captured interpreters into 3D avatars that sign Kenyan Sign Language in real time, working with dozens of deaf and hard-of-hearing Kenyans to teach the system to sign like they do.
The person and the place
Elly Savatia, an engineer in Nairobi, Kenya, who traces the drive back to age 10: "how you can use this passion to create a solution to a problem in a community."
The problem he cared about
He had watched a class of 300 deaf students share a single interpreter, a gap goodwill alone could not close.
The agency moment
In 2023 he founded Signvrse and built Terp 360, motion-capturing real interpreters into 3D avatars that turn speech and text into Kenyan Sign Language in real time. "We like to call it Google Translate for sign language," he says. More than 30 deaf Kenyans have worked with him directly on it, recording the 2,300-plus signs the system now knows.
What changed, with evidence
More than 2,000 members of Nairobi's deaf community have used Terp 360's web app, testing with deaf users has pushed its accuracy past 85 percent, and Kenya's National Innovation Agency is now a client. It is honest about what it cannot yet do: English to Kenyan Sign Language only, for now. Leakey Nyabaro, founder of Nairobi's Galaxy Sign Language Training Centre, has said publicly it still has errors and works best in sign-to-voice mode, "which helps the hearing community more than the deaf." Savatia does not dispute the gap: "We're not replacing human interpreters. We're filling the gaps, especially where interpreters aren't available."
Where it led
Kelvin Munene, a deaf waiter in Nairobi who has struggled to communicate at hospitals and in job interviews, thinks it will help. No one has yet documented that it has. Know someone stuck bridging a gap like the one three hundred students once shared? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"We're not replacing human interpreters. We're filling the gaps, especially where interpreters aren't available." — Elly Savatia, CGTN Africa
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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