Technology
AfDB, Microsoft to Train 500 Youths as Digital Ambassadors
By Adedapo Adesanya
The African Development Bank (AfDB) has opened the Coding for Employment programme, which will train over 500 digital ambassadors to lead a peer-to-peer training model set to expand digital skills to more African youth, especially in rural communities with limited internet connectivity.
Coding for Employment and its technical partners, Microsoft Philanthropies, will offer the digital ambassadors an intensive three-month programme featuring in-demand skills, such as web design and digital marketing, as well as soft skills such as critical thinking, project management and communication.
At the end of the coursework, the Abidjan-based lender and Microsoft Philanthropies will provide graduates with information and communication technology toolkits and resources so they can offer the same training within their local communities.
Coding for Employment online platforms and in-person classes offer these technical courses for free.
The programme recently hit a 130,000-enrollment milestone among young people across Africa on its eLearning and Digital Nigeria platforms.
Speaking on this, Mrs Martha Phiri, Director of the Bank’s Human Capital, Youth and Skills Development Department at AfDB said, “It is very important that we build upon the success of the Coding for Employment program to take digital literacy to the grassroots.
“The community-based model will ensure that the youth in rural areas are digitally empowered, which further affirms the Bank’s commitment to raising the next generation of digitally enabled youth and women on the continent.”
The digital ambassadors initiative is part of the Bank’s strategy to centre its technology and digital investments around the youth and enable them to bring about economic and social transformation in the digital age.
The digital ambassadors peer-to-peer model is expected to draw more youth because it offers a more personalized learning experience.
Applicants, aged between 18 and 35 years, are expected to be proficient in English or French and must be citizens of Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, or Senegal. Coding for Employment expects to expand the digital ambassador program to other countries soon after the pilot phase.
On his part, Mrs Ghada Khalifa, Regional Director for Microsoft Philanthropies, Middle East and Africa noted, “Today’s youth are our future leaders and entrepreneurs, which is why it is so critical that we empower them with the digital skills they need to contribute meaningfully to the global digital economy.
“Microsoft is honoured to be partnering with the African Development Bank on its incredible Coding for Employment programme,” she explained.
Digital ambassadors will receive stipends and have access to the digital skills training centres in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Rwanda. They will also have access to a network of employers, private sector partners and freelancing platforms.
The Coding for Employment digital ambassadors initiative aims to achieve at least 50 per cent of women participation by collaborating with women’s groups and strongly encouraging women to be part of the programme.
Interested applicants can register to become a Coding for Employment digital ambassador through:
French form: https://bit.ly/3CmLvMT
English form: https://bit.ly/3HxNMbN
The application deadline for the first cohort (known as the Nile Cohort) has been pegged as December 31, 2021, at 5:00 pm GMT.
Coding for Employment aims to create over 9 million jobs and reach 32 million youth and women across Africa. The programme is part of the Bank’s Jobs for Youth in Africa Initiative.
Technology
Capillary Technologies Acquires SessionM from Mastercard
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
A software product company established in 2012, Capillary Technologies India Limited, has acquired the customer engagement and loyalty company, SessionM, from Mastercard.
This followed a definitive agreement signed by the global leader in AI-powered customer loyalty and engagement solutions with the renowned digital payments firm.
The acquisition of SessionM is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Capillary, following its successful listing on the Indian Stock Exchange in November 2025.
With SessionM in its portfolio, Capillary reinforces its position as a global leader in enterprise loyalty, offering a leading platform to the world’s most sophisticated enterprise brands.
Mastercard has identified Capillary Technologies—consistently recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave as the ideal partner to lead SessionM into its next era of growth.
As part of the agreement, a specialised team within SessionM will transition to Capillary, ensuring that the platform’s deep technical expertise is preserved.
SessionM’s esteemed global customer base—which includes Fortune 500 retailers, airlines, and CPG brands—will continue to receive the same high-calibre support and service they experienced before the acquisition.
“M&A has been a key growth strategy for Capillary over the years, and as a public company, we are delivering on that promise to our shareholders and the market.
“By bringing SessionM into our portfolio, we are not just expanding our footprint across the globe; we are further strengthening our loyalty capabilities to deliver one of the industry’s most comprehensive offerings.
“Our mission remains to provide enterprises across industries with specialised, AI-native loyalty technology solutions,” the chief executive of Capillary Technologies, Aneesh Reddy, commented.
Technology
Emergent Ventures, Others Invest $2.2m in Potpie
By Dipo Olowookere
About $2.2 million pre-seed round to help engineering teams unify context across their entire stack and make AI agents genuinely useful in complex software environments has been announced by Potpie.
Potpie was established by Aditi Kothari and Dhiren Mathur, who were determined to unify context across the entire engineering stack and enabling spec driven development.
As generative AI adoption accelerates, most tools focus on surface-level code generation while ignoring the deeper problem of context.
Large language models are powerful, but without access to system-level understanding, tooling history, and architectural intent, they struggle in real production environments.
Traditional approaches rely on senior engineers to manually hold this context together, a model that breaks down at scale and fails when AI agents are introduced.
The platform enables teams to automate high-impact and non-trivial use cases across the software development lifecycle, like debugging cross-service failures, maintaining and writing end-to-end tests, blast radius detection and system design.
It is designed for enterprise companies with large and complex codebases, starting at around one million lines of code and scaling to hundreds of millions.
Rather than acting as another coding assistant, Potpie builds a graphical representation of software systems, infers behaviour and patterns across modules, and creates structured artefacts that allow agents to operate consistently and safely.
A statement made available to Business Post on Monday revealed that the funding support came from Emergent Ventures, All In Capital, DeVC and Point One Capital.
The capital will be used to support early enterprise deployments, expand the engineering team, and continue building Potpie’s core context and agent infrastructure, it was disclosed.
“As AI makes code generation easier, the real challenge shifts to reasoning across massive, interconnected systems. Potpie is our answer to that shift, an ontology-first layer that helps enterprises truly understand and manage their software,” Kothari was quoted as saying in the disclosure.
A Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, Anupam Rastogi, said, “In large enterprises, the real challenge is not generating code, it is understanding the system deeply enough to change it safely.
“Potpie’s ontology-first architecture, combined with rigorous context curation and spec-driven development, creates a structured model of the entire engineering ecosystem. This allows AI agents to reason across services, dependencies, tickets, and production signals with the clarity of a senior engineer. That is what makes Potpie uniquely capable of solving complex RCA, impact analysis, and high-risk feature work even in codebases exceeding 50 million lines.”
Technology
Expert Reveals Top Cyber Threats Organisations Will Encounter in 2026
By Adedapo Adesanya
Organisations in 2026 face a cybersecurity landscape markedly different from previous years, driven by rapid artificial intelligence adoption, entrenched remote work models, and increasingly interconnected digital systems, with experts warning that these shifts have expanded attack surfaces faster than many security teams can effectively monitor.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, AI-related vulnerabilities now rank among the most urgent concerns, with 87 per cent of cybersecurity professionals worldwide highlighting them as a top risk.
In a note shared with Business Post, Mr Danny Mitchell, Cybersecurity Writer at Heimdal, said artificial intelligence presents a “category shift” in cyber risk.
“Attackers are manipulating the logic systems that increasingly run critical business processes,” he explained, noting that AI models controlling loan decisions or infrastructure have become high-value targets. Machine learning systems can be poisoned with corrupted training data or manipulated through adversarial inputs, often without immediate detection.
Mr Mitchell also warned that AI-powered phishing and fraud are growing more sophisticated. Deepfake technology and advanced language models now produce convincing emails, voice calls and videos that evade traditional detection.
“The sophistication of modern phishing means organisations can no longer rely solely on employee awareness training,” he said, urging multi-channel verification for sensitive transactions.
Supply chain vulnerabilities remain another major threat. Modern software ecosystems rely on numerous vendors and open-source components, each representing a potential entry point.
“Most organisations lack complete visibility into their software supply chain,” Mr Mitchell said, adding that attackers frequently exploit trusted vendors or update mechanisms to bypass perimeter defences.
Meanwhile, unpatched software vulnerabilities continue to expose organisations to risk, as attackers use automated tools to scan for weaknesses within hours of public disclosure. Legacy systems and critical infrastructure are especially difficult to secure.
Ransomware operations have also evolved, with criminals spending weeks inside networks before launching attacks.
“Modern ransomware operations function like businesses,” Mitchell observed, employing double extortion tactics to maximise pressure on victims.
Mr Mitchell concluded that the common thread across 2026 threats is complexity, noting that organisations need to abandon the idea that they can defend against everything equally, as this approach spreads resources too thin and leaves critical assets exposed.
“You cannot protect what you don’t know exists,” he said, urging organisations to prioritise visibility, map dependencies, and focus resources on the most critical assets.
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