Call for Proposals: The NaijaVoices Language Heritage Micro-Grants
NaijaVoices announces the Language Heritage Micro-Grant, a national call for proposals to support community-driven projects that build, enrich, and conserve Nigeria’s linguistic diversity. Rooted in our principle of data farming, NaijaVoices is committed to empowering communities to cultivate, own, and benefit from their language resources. Funds from the commercial use of NaijaVoices datasets are being […]
The State of African Language Datasets
Motivation Our digital world is a rich tapestry of ideas, languages, cultures, and knowledge. However, our access to and understanding of these resources is skewed; some gain significant visibility, while others remain under-represented, and obscure (even when available on the web). Our understanding is largely defined by what’s findable. In today’s fast-paced digital age, online […]
Lanfrica V2 – What’s Cooking Under the Hood
For the past 9 months, we have been hard at work on revamping Lanfrica. As we wrap up, we wanted to share a sneak peek on some things to expect. Changes coming to the Lanfrica frontend We have some exciting things coming to the frontend: A cleaner discovery interface: our previous records platform, with the […]
Your Voice Matters: Join the TWB Voice Project and Make A Difference
At Lanfrica, we believe that language is inherent for human communication and communication. While many language technology efforts are based on text, truly connecting the tapestry of African languages requires building technologies that truly support Africans, requires being able to connect them via their major medium of communication – audio. Therefore, enabling spoken language technology […]
The Fundamentals of AI Research Writing Workshop
Lanfrica is happy to support LyngualLabs in the creation of a much-needed, hands‑on workshop dedicated to improving the writing skills of (AI) researchers in the Global South. Motivation Research writing is the bridge for transforming our ideas into impact. In the competitive, fast-paced space of AI, many of the ideas of researchers from the Global […]
Lanfrica at WIPO: Copyright Policies for the development of Artificial Intelligence in Latin America and Africa
Lanfrica was honored to participate in a high-level panel at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) during the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, in a side event titled “Promoting AI for Good in the Global South” which took place April 7 to April 11, 2025, in Geneva, Switzerland. The event, which was jointly […]
Lanfrica at LT4ALL 2025: Data Farming and The NaijaVoices Experience
We’re proud to share that Prof. GMT Emezue, Lanfrica’s Coordinator for Nigeria, was invited to speak at the 2nd International Conference on Language Technologies for All (LT4ALL 2025), held at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, February 24th to 26th, 2025. Organized by the International Language Resources Association (ELRA) and its Special Interest Group on Under-resourced […]
Lanfrica Shines at MozFest Zambia 2024 — NaijaVoices Wins Data Futures Showcase
Lusaka, Zambia — 20 November 2024 — Lanfrica proudly announces that its flagship community project NaijaVoices was crowned winner of the Data Futures Showcase at Mozilla Festival (MozFest) Zambia 2024, a gathering that celebrates African innovators who are “flipping the script” on data ownership and cultural preservation. Spotlight on the Data Futures Showcase MozFest’s Data Futures Showcase highlights builders around […]
Mapping Nigeria’s Digital Language Landscape: Community Sprint
First things to do: Background: Web Languages Project Welcome! This is a crowd-sourced effort to improve crawling of low-resource languages. This dataset is public. Common Crawl recognizes a lot of languages, and we can see that we don’t have enough of languages. We are interested in languages from all over the world. If you choose […]
From Consumers to Builders – Lanfrica’s Data Unconference Recap
On October 29, 2024, Lanfrica hosted The Lanfrica Data Unconference, a fully‑virtual gathering on Zoom designed to re‑imagine who gets to shape language technology for African and other under‑represented languages. Motivation “You don’t have to be a computer scientist to influence the technology that affects your language.” In today’s digital world, indigenous and minority languages are at […]
