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 directly reinvested to grow new datasets by and for Nigerian communities.
Nigeria boasts more than 500 languages, yet most of them are undocumented, un-recognized, and largely endangered. In technologies, only the three main languages – Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba – receive the most attention and efforts, while the other languages are largely untouched.
NaijaVoices wants to change that. We are committed to empowering communities, individuals to preserve, and own their linguistic heritage, especially the tail-end, lesser-known languages and dialects. Through this call for proposals, we aim to spark and support grassroots projects that conserve and revitalize Nigeria’s rich linguistic diversity, and ensure that every language, no matter how small, finds its place in the digital future.
Funding Tiers
Large Grant
- Amount: ₦1,000,000 per project
- Awards: 3 projects
Small Grant
- Amount: ₦300,000 per project
- Awards: 3 projects
- Target: Smaller datasets (as small as 1 hour), ideal for very remote or endangered languages, single individuals.
Non-financial support: All awardees will receive mentoring, expert advice, workshops (e.g., annotation templates, recording guidelines).
Eligibility
As a grassroot initiative, we strive to significantly reduce any barrier to entry, allowing individuals (or groups of individuals) to apply whether or not they are affiliated with an organization. The formal requirements for eligibility are below:
- Groups of individuals from any (or no) affiliation (e.g. team members from community-based organizations, institutions, research labs, NGOs, schools, or informal language groups).
- Individuals, applying solely, are also eligible.
- This call for proposal is focused on Nigerian languages.
- At least one member of your proposed project should have worked on the NaijaVoices dataset project in any way. Evidence of participation in the NaijaVoices project is required and should be in the proposal.
Proposal Requirements
Your proposal (max 7 pages) must be submitted as a PDF file and must have the following sections:
- Language: What language(s) is your project working on? Why is this language important? How many speakers? How endangered is it?
- Project goals and methodology: what is your project about? How will you achieve your goals?
- Number of hours of speech you plan to collect and how many recorders will be involved. All proposals must have a speech component to the language data being cultivated.
- Timeline and deliverables: how long will the project last, and how will you measure success of the project at its different stages?
- Community engagement: how will you recruit community members, how do you ensure informed consent on why their data is being collected, what it will be used for, what rights they have. We appreciate innovative, culturally-grounded approaches to informed consent.
- Please indicate how many members of the NaijaVoices community (or the broader Lanfrica community) will be actively involved in your project. Since one of the core goals of this grant is to give back to the community that made NaijaVoices possible, projects that meaningfully engage more community members will be viewed more favorably.
- Budget breakdown: please include a breakdown of how the funds will be utilized; who are the workforce that will be paid and at what rate; what additional costs ( transportation, accommodation, etc) will be incurred by the project.
- Sustainability plan: how do you plan to keep this project alive after the funding runs out? You do not need to have a concrete plan — it’s important that you are thinking about it and exploring approaches.
- Letter from a guarantor: to ensure accountability and responsible use of funds, each applicant is required to submit a signed letter from a guarantor. This guarantor should be someone who knows you personally or professionally and is willing to vouch for your integrity and reliability. The letter should briefly explain the nature of your relationship and why the guarantor believes you can be trusted to carry out the project responsibly. The guarantor must sign the letter.
You are free to add any other sections necessary for your project proposal.
Selection Criteria
The aim of the criteria table below is to give applicants an idea of some (not all) of the factors being used to assess proposals and how important they are (communicated via the weight column).
| Criteria | Weight (1-5) |
|---|---|
| Focus on endangered, tail-end, unpopular languages, languages without online resources | 5 |
| Feasibility and clear methodology (timeline, plan) | 5 |
| Amount and quality of speech data collected (clear audio, minimal noise). This parameter is viewed according to the scale of the project (whether small or large) | 3 |
| Innovation in capturing natural, nuanced speech. Being able to capture people speaking naturally, in a conversational manner, etc. | 3 |
| Community engagement | 2 |
| Ethics and informed consent strategy. How do you inform the voice donors/recorders about their voice data; what it’s being used for, how it’ll be used; their rights; | 2 |
| Sustainability plan | 1 |
Output Format & Quality Requirements
The expected outputs of each project should include:
- Audios
- All project outputs must have an audio component. The audios should be recorded at sampling rate of 48kHz
- Audio quality factors:
- No background noise (or minimal)
- No echo
- Natural, spontaneous speech preferred (unless proposal specifies otherwise)
- If text or any other medium is provided:
- A CSV file pairing audio filenames with transcriptions
- Metadata (e.g., speaker age range, gender) in the CSV
Financial Release Schedule
This is how we plan to release the funds to the awarded projects:
- First tranche: 20% (upon signing MOU)
- Second tranche: 30% (project checkpoint)
- Third tranche: 30% (project checkpoint)
- Fourth tranche: 20% (upon submission of final dataset & report)
Funding Timeline
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Call launched | 19th May |
| Proposal deadline | 18th June |
| Proposal Review & selection | 7th July |
| Awards announcement | 9th July |
| Project period | August 1 – October 30th |
| Final reports & dataset delivery | 5th November |
Some Ideas You Can Explore
Below are some project ideas if you are looking for inspiration. We welcome other ideas, so feel free to explore. It’s important to communicate in your proposal why your focus is important, its impact and transformation potential.
- Indigenous folktales narrated in indigenous languages.
- Digitization of existing language projects in Nigerian universities and creating audio datasets from them
- Audio datasets of proverbs, idiomatic expressions, and riddles (“proverb hunting”).
- Multilingual proverb collections showcasing variation across languages.
- Speech + sign language datasets capturing rich multimodal communication.
Additionally, we invite proposals that:
- Record natural, unprompted speech in real-world settings (homes, markets, schools).
- Document dialects and subtle shifts within language communities.
- Capture multilingual interactions and code-switching episodes.
- Annotate paralinguistic features (e.g., laughter, hesitation, sarcasm, emotion).
- Explore Nigerian sign languages and other non-verbal linguistic forms.
Contact / Connect With Us
For questions or clarifications, you can reach out to NaijaVoices via its email: [email protected].
Additionally, we have created a Telegram group, specifically for this CFP, which could be more comfortable to some people for asking questions, getting guidance during the proposal preparation, finding teammates, etc. Click here to join the group.
Submit your proposal
Submit your proposal by clicking the button below, which will take you to the form for the submission process.
Info Session
We will be hosting an information session on May 30th, from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM (WAT) via Zoom. This session will provide an overview of the grant, walk through the application process, and answer any questions from interested applicants. All are welcome to attend.
Learning more about NaijaVoices
