Research & Innovation

Empowering African
Languages through AI

Hosted at Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI), African Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Pretoria — we bridge technical AI and local linguistic contexts to drive Africa's digital transformation.

View Scientific Outputs Workshop Archive
AI4D African Languages Lab

Vision & Impact

The Lab is dedicated to building human capacity and creating digital innovations that contribute to Africa's digital transformation. In our first year, we have bridged the gap between technical AI and local linguistic contexts through cross-disciplinary collaborations in law, humanities, and education.

Core Research Directions

Addressing the unique complexities of low-resource languages.

01

Foundational Language Models

Innovating context-aware word embeddings and mathematical models specifically designed for the richness of African scripts and tonality.

02

Responsible AI & Governance

Prioritising ethical data curation, equitable licensing, and frameworks that preserve culture while reducing AI hallucinations.

03

High-Impact Applications

Developing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for critical sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and sustainable development.

04

Inclusive Technology

Advancing speech recognition for children and South African Sign Language (SASL) to bridge the digital divide for under-represented communities.

Major Milestones

Year one: building institutions, datasets and capacity.

Institute Launch
Establishment of AfriDSAI
Support from the AI4D program was instrumental in launching the new African Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AfriDSAI) in early 2025.
Dataset
AfroCS-XS Project
Completion of a human-validated synthetic code-switched dataset for four African languages.
Speech
3,000 Hours of Speech
Ongoing development of a massive speech dataset for seven South African languages.