The Masakhane African Languages Hub the Hub has announced a major Request for Proposals RFP to address the severe underrepresentation of African languages in Artificial Intelligence AI. The Hub invites African researchers, linguists, startups, technologists and community organizations to build high-quality, inclusive and community-driven datasets for 50 African languages.
While Africa is home to over 2,000 languages, they are almost absent from the global digital landscape none of the top 34 languages used globally on the internet are African. This imbalance risks not only excluding more than one billion speakers from emerging technologies but also perpetuating harmful biases and inaccuracies that can undermine equitable use of new technologies.
Supported by Google.org, and FCDO, IDRC and the Gates Foundation, the new project aims to counter this trend by ensuring AI technologies are built on accurate, inclusive, culturally relevant, and ethically sourced data.
