background pattern of chat bubbles in orange, yellow, and purple

LINGUA Africa Open Call

Empowering inclusive AI through open language resources

Woman in Africa

Announcing LINGUA Africa Open Call Awardees

Across Africa, thousands of languages remain underrepresented in modern AI systems. When languages are not well represented in datasets, models, and tools, communities face barriers to accessing education, healthcare information, public services, financial inclusion, and other opportunities increasingly shaped by digital technologies. 

To help address this gap, Microsoft AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation, the Masakhane African Languages Hub, and Google.org launched LINGUA Africa, an open call designed to strengthen the language foundations needed for inclusive AI in Africa.

“LINGUA Africa seeks to encourage bold and innovative thinking by breaking down barriers that have long held back AI progress across the continent—vital access to data, computational power, and technical assistance. With these resources unlocked, I am truly excited to witness the transformative innovations that will emerge from this initiative.” 

— Howard Lakougna, Senior Program Officer, Gates Foundation

Partnerships for Progress

The 26 selected projects span more than 50 African languages, dialects, and sign languages spoken by more than 500 million people across 47 African countries. Together, they reflect remarkable linguistic and geographic diversity—from widely spoken languages such as Kiswahili, Hausa, Amharic, Wolof, and Luganda to underrepresented languages such as Awngi, Tjwao, Doma, Medumba, and Ghomala’, as well as Tanzanian Sign Language and several Hausa dialects. 

The awardees bring together universities, nonprofits, international and humanitarian organisations, research institutes, startups, and community-led initiatives. Their projects address health, agriculture, education, justice, public services, journalism, and digital inclusion, with a strong emphasis on creating open speech, text, multimodal, and sign-language datasets; developing automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies; and building practical AI tools for underserved communities. 

From clinical communication and maternal health to agricultural advice, access to justice, local journalism, and cultural preservation, these projects will help increase the availability and quality of African-language resources and ensure that multilingual AI better reflects the knowledge, needs, and realities of African communities.

map

The future of AI must be shaped by the people it serves. This opportunity provides much needed resourcing in the form of funding and compute to enable African led AI solutions with a lasting impact on enabling access to relevant tools for day to day needs.”

— Chenai Chair, Director of Masakhane African Languages Hub

List of awardees  

We’re grateful to the Gates Foundation, Google.org, and Masakhane for their close collaboration and support throughout the evaluation and selection process. 

We’re pleased to announce the selected projects for the LINGUA Africa Open Call: 

  • AFYA-LINGUA: A Community-Grounded African-Language Layer for Health — World Health Organization (Kenya) — Kiswahili, Hausa, Yorùbá, Lingala, Amharic, isiZulu, Chichewa, Wolof, Kinyarwanda, and Crioulo 
  • AgroLingua Africa: Multimodal Vision-Language AI for Agricultural Advisory in 10 African Languages — Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (United Arab Emirates) — Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Twi (Akan), Wolof, Kiswahili, Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Luganda, and Kinyarwanda 
  • AI-Powered Access to Justice for Women and Girls in Malawi — Women Lawyers Association of Malawi (Malawi) — Chichewa 
  • The Awigna Multimodal Educational Corpus: Building an Open-Source Text and Speech-Alignment Resource for Primary Education — Injibara University (Ethiopia) — Awngi (Awigna) 
  • BAAT: Corpus ouverts de parole et de texte en wolof et pulaar pour une IA accessible aux populations non scolarisées — Université Numérique Cheikh Hamidou Kane (Senegal) — Wolof and Pulaar 
  • Building the First Maternal and Child Health Speech Dataset for Five Underrepresented African Languages — Makerere University (Uganda) — Luganda, Acholi, Dholuo, Dinka, and Juba Arabic 
  • Building the Luganda Medical Speech Layer: An Open Corpus and Foundational Models for African Clinical AI — Crails, Inc. (United States) — Luganda 
  • Clinical Language Resources for Ghana — Africa Care Operating System, ACOS Ltd. (Ghana) — Twi (Akan), Ga, and Ewe 
  • DialectBridge: Parameter-Efficient Speech Adapters for Hausa Dialectal Inclusion — HausaNLP (Nigeria) — Kananci (Kano), Sakkwatanci (Sokoto), Zazzaganci (Zaria), and Katsinanci (Katsina) Hausa 
  • Infrastructure vocale du bassin du Congo: Données ouvertes, ASR et TTS pour le lingala, le kituba et le kikongo — Bantu Language Initiative (Republic of the Congo) — Lingala, Kituba, and Kikongo 
  • A Kinyarwanda AI Tutor for Community Health Workers — Digital Umuganda Limited (Rwanda) — Kinyarwanda 
  • Krio Voices: An Open, Use-Case-Driven Speech and Text Corpus for Sierra Leone’s Lingua Franca — Christex Foundation (Sierra Leone) — Krio 
  • LinguaBridge: Open Speech AI for Underserved West African and MENA Languages, Powered by Humanitarian Community Feedback — World Food Program USA (United States) — Wolof, Pulaar, Mooré, Bambara, Hausa, Twi (Akan), and Hassaniya Arabic 
  • Mémoire Vivante du Café: A Culture-Rich Community Speech Corpus for Underrepresented Grassfields Cameroonian Languages — KmerAI (France) — Ghomala’, Medumba, and Fe’efe’e (Nufi) 
  • MlimiVoice Malawi: Inclusive African Language AI for Smallholder Farmers — Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Kenya) — Chichewa and Tumbuka 
  • MVEKA-AI: A Voice-First Chichewa Artificial Intelligence Platform for Rural Digital Inclusion in Health and Agriculture — Nyanja Health Research Institute (Malawi) — Chichewa (Chinyanja) 
  • The Newsroom Corpus: Africa’s Community Media as Sustainable Language Data Engines — Develop AI Foundation NPC (South Africa) — Bemba, Nyanja, Shona, Ndebele, Oshiwambo, Dholuo, and Maa 
  • Open Language Resources for Health and Education in Tonga, Tjwao, and Doma — Ushahidi Inc. (Kenya) — Tonga, Tjwao, and Doma 
  • RADA — Algedi Intelligence Labs Limited (Kenya) — Kiswahili, Gĩkũyũ, Kamba, Dholuo, Maa, Kalenjin, and Somali 
  • SAM App: AI-Powered Krio Telemedicine for Inclusive Healthcare in Sierra Leone — Institute for Development (Sierra Leone) — Krio 
  • Sasa — Infectious Diseases Institute (Uganda) — Acholi, Runyakitara, Kikuyu, Luo, Afaan Oromo, Tigrigna, Kiswahili, and Amharic 
  • SemaShambani: Voice-First Agricultural Advisory and Credit Literacy — AntuGrow Limited (Kenya) — Kiswahili, Gĩkũyũ, Kikamba, Dholuo, Luhya (Bukusu), and Kalenjin 
  • SomaliLegalLM — SIMAD University (Somalia) — Somali 
  • TSL-Open: Building an Open, Community-Led Tanzanian Sign Language Resource — Arusha Technical College (Tanzania) — Tanzanian Sign Language 
  • Voix pour la santé: Ressources linguistiques ouvertes et application de communication vaccinale en langues nationales guinéennes — Efficience Globale S.A.R.L.U. (Guinea) — Soussou (Susu), Pular, and Maninka 
  • An Open Multilingual Clinical-Language Resource for Community Health in Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, and Somali — TIP Global Health (United States) — Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, and Somali 

“AI only delivers value when people can actually use it, and language is the bridge. For example, in agriculture, farmers increasingly rely on digital advisory services for crop management and market information. If that guidance isn’t available in a language they understand, it fails to translate into action. This applies across sectors, from healthcare to education. LINGUA Africa is an important step toward grounding innovation in real-world impact by supporting community-led efforts and enabling people to act on critical information in their own languages.” 

Inbal Becker-Reshef, Managing Director, AI for Good Lab

African pattern design