Kenya-based initiative targets 50 African languages in push to end digital exclusion of over one billion speakers
In a significant move to address the glaring absence of African languages from the global AI landscape, the Masakhane African Languages Hub has launched a major funding initiative this month aimed at integrating 50 African languages into artificial intelligence systems. The project represents a critical intervention in a technological landscape that has largely overlooked the linguistic diversity of an entire continent.
The stark reality facing African languages is captured in a single statistic: despite Africa being home to more than 2,000 languages spoken by over one billion people, not a single African language appears among the top 34 languages used globally on the internet. This digital invisibility threatens to exclude an entire continent from the AI revolution, perpetuating inequalities and embedding biases that could undermine technological advancement across Africa for generations.
A Movement Beyond Models
The Hub’s Request for Proposals initiative, supported by a coalition including Google.org, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Development Research Centre, and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, goes beyond simple technical solutions. According to Chenai Chair, Director of the Masakhane African Languages Hub, the project represents something more profound than dataset creation.
The initiative centers on three technological priorities: developing Automatic Speech Recognition systems with large-scale voice data for 18 languages, with particular emphasis on gender balance and authentic local contexts; conducting real-world benchmarking studies that test AI performance in actual African environments rather than controlled laboratory settings; and building culturally relevant multimodal datasets that integrate image, text, and speech data for 40 languages to transform translation and education tools.
The approach emphasizes community-driven development, inviting African researchers, linguists, startups, technology firms, and community organizations to participate. The Hub is particularly focused on centering marginalized groups including women, rural communities, and the elderly in the development process, embodying the Ubuntu philosophy of collective progress.
Building on Momentum
This 2026 initiative follows a highly successful 2025 pilot program that received 93 applications from 22 countries across Africa, signaling substantial appetite for locally-led AI development throughout the continent. Successful applicants in the current round will receive not only funding but also institutional support and a global platform to showcase African-led innovation.
The Hub’s vision extends beyond immediate technical goals. The organization aims to empower one billion Africans by 2029 with locally relevant AI tools and resources, creating opportunities for economic development, local innovation, and the preservation of Africa’s linguistic heritage. The project is designed to shift Africa’s position in the AI ecosystem from passive consumer of technologies developed elsewhere to active contributor to ethical and inclusive AI innovation worldwide.
Addressing a Fundamental Gap
The underrepresentation of African languages in AI systems is not merely a technical oversight but a reflection of deeper structural inequalities in technology development. When AI systems are trained primarily on data from a narrow range of languages, they fail to understand African names, cultures, places, and histories. This creates barriers in healthcare, education, agriculture, climate adaptation, and government services, sectors identified as critical for digital development across Africa.
The initiative’s focus on data sovereignty represents another crucial dimension of the project. The Hub operates on the principle that Africans should control what data represents their communities globally, retain ownership of that data, and understand how it is used. This approach challenges the extractive data practices that have often characterized technology development in the Global South.
A Grassroots Foundation
Masakhane, which translates roughly to “We build together” in isiZulu, began as a grassroots organization committed to strengthening natural language processing research in African languages, by Africans, for Africans. The organization’s philosophy draws on the concept of Ubuntu, meaning “a person is a person through another person” or “I am because you are,” emphasizing collaboration and community participation.
The Hub’s work is anchored in principles of open access and reproducibility, with all outputs intended to be shared as digital public goods under licenses like Creative Commons Attribution. This commitment to transparency and accessibility aims to ensure that the benefits of AI development reach the communities whose languages and cultural knowledge make that development possible.
With applications open until January 25, 2026, the initiative represents a transformative moment in the effort to ensure that AI technologies reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity of all humanity, not just the privileged few whose languages have dominated digital development. For Africa’s indigenous languages, which have suffered centuries of marginalization dating back to colonialism, the project offers a pathway to technological inclusion and cultural preservation in the digital age.
The success or failure of this initiative will have implications far beyond Africa, serving as a test case for whether AI development can genuinely become inclusive and equitable, or whether it will continue to replicate the inequalities of the pre-digital world in even more entrenched forms.
