Africa Project
African language NLP
built in African context
The Africa Project exists to strengthen and accelerate NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. It responds to a simple gap with enormous consequences: African languages are foundational to human communication on the continent, yet they remain barely represented in modern technology.
Mission
Build rich resources for African languages and AI systems that reflect African values, ideals, and lived realities.
Through collaboration with communities and researchers, the project aims to create the datasets, evaluation frameworks, and shared research infrastructure needed to make African language AI more credible, more useful, and more inclusive.
Why now
Roughly 2,000 of the world’s languages are African, yet African languages remain deeply underrepresented in technology.
The project prioritizes language resources for AI that are useful in real African contexts rather than generic benchmark theater.
Collaboration is treated as infrastructure: communities, researchers, and technical teams shape the direction together.
01
Research for Africans, by Africans
The project exists to strengthen and spur natural language processing research in African languages by centering African researchers, communities, and institutions in the work itself.
02
Community-grounded resources
Through collaboration with communities and researchers, the work focuses on building rich language resources that reflect African realities, values, and ideals in context.
03
Inclusion through language technology
The long-term aim is broader inclusion across Africa: financially, technologically, scientifically, and socially, through tools that do not leave African languages behind.
Inclusion goal
Enable broader inclusion across Africa in finance, technology, science, and public life by making language access part of the infrastructure.
The project treats language representation as a prerequisite for meaningful participation. Better language resources lead to better tools, and better tools expand who gets to benefit from digital systems, research progress, and economic opportunity.