The trigger

Algiers, a continental summit. Three working languages on the podium, a Central African delegation in the room, and backstage an interpreter hired the night before by messaging app. The briefing documents — draft agreements, unpublished figures — had circulated by email to a personal address. Nobody had checked who he was.

The caterer had been vetted. The audiovisual contractor had signed a specification. The interpreter, who was about to hear everything, had signed nothing at all.

The problem

The continent hosts a growing number of summits, investment forums and sector negotiations. All are multilingual by construction. Yet interpreters are still sourced by word of mouth, assignments coordinated in spreadsheets, and sensitive documents sent over consumer messaging.

This is not a competence problem: conference interpreters are rigorous and their professional ethics are long-established. It is a tooling problem. A system resting solely on individual ethics produces no verifiable guarantee.

The angle

Lobaka treats interpretation as what it is: a link in the sensitive-information chain. Identity and credential verification for practitioners. Briefing documents distributed through an encrypted, named-access space with expiry and access logging. Full traceability of who read what, and when.

None of this requires research. All of it requires organisation. Which is precisely what makes its current absence hard to justify.

Where the product stands

At prototype stage. I say so plainly: a founder who announces a prototype inspires more confidence than a vague one. The name comes from Lingala, in which lobaka means to speak.