Lanfrica V2 is Here! A New Era for African AI Discovery

Lanfrica V2 has landed! A new way to discover the vast ecosystem of African AI. Play around with it: https://lanfrica.com

Lanfrica is an open-access platform for users to freely interact with our mapping of the African AI ecosystem. Lanfrica organizes Africa’s vast AI resources – datasets, papers, models, and more – under one connected hub. Whether you’re a researcher conducting a literature review, an AI developer searching for African datasets to train your models, a content writer looking for dictionaries and linguistic tools, or understanding the use-cases of AI in Africa, Lanfrica provides extensive coverage of the African AI landscape, mapping the tools, research, datasets, and resources you need.

Why does this matter? Because discoverability is fundamental to impact.

In today’s digital world, if you cannot find something, it practically does not exist for you . When an AI developer can’t find the Gikuyu speech dataset they need, a student cannot find the dictionary for their language, or a government officer cannot find the use cases of AI in their country, innovation stalls.

The vast, fragmented, and siloed landscape of AI in Africa had been largely unmapped before Lanfrica. Without our cohesive mapping of the ecosystem, efforts remain fragmented, innovation is siloed and frequently duplicated, decision-makers lack a holistic picture, and Africa continues to be marginalized in global AI development.

In 2024, the Lanfrica platform was set for a makeover, with a uniquely passionate team, support from the Masakhane Research Foundation, and the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) through the FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All project. Our goal was twofold: revamp the search experience and ensure broader coverage of African AI innovation. In doing so, the richness of African contributions can be discovered, easily accessed, and connected. Discoverability and use of local content means tailored solutions to the continent’s problems, context for local research, promoting local innovation and spurring economic growth.

What’s New in V2

Earlier in 2025, we gave a peek at some features to expect in this article. Accompanying this launch, we’ve put out a detailed changelog here. Below are the highlights.

There’s so much more African AI innovation than we realize

Throughout our journey, one significant realization has stood out. There is far more African innovation and contributions in AI than most of us recognize: far more than what surfaces when we search on popular search engines or leverage our go-to repositories or networks.

This understanding has humbled us and deepened our appreciation for the scientific impact emerging from the continent. Her Excellency, President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah of Namibia, in her speech at the inaugural Namibia public-private forum gave a sage advice: “we should not discuss and negotiate with the poverty mentality“. For too long, the African AI landscape has been plagued with a scarcity mentality. While some part of it has grounds, a large part of this “scarcity” feeling is because there hasn’t been a dedicated entity connecting the dots for Africa. Our “mapping” vision with Lanfrica is to shine a very bright light on the abundant African resources, and reveal how they connect with, and can be utilized across the AI landscape.

With the development of the Lanfrica Harvester, our internal technology for automated metadata harvesting and knowledge management, we’ve significantly scaled our mapping effort. We have dramatically expanded our catalog, with more than 400,000 resources mapped from over 77,000 contributors. “Resources” here includes papers, datasets, models, tools, and more.

Improved Search Experience

Navigating the vastness that is AI in Africa can feel like landing in a new country with no map. Lanfrica aims to be your guide, illuminating the path, leading you through its diversity, and fostering a deeper, holistic understanding.

The “explore the landscape” section on the landing page helps users understand the possibilities with Lanfrica and highlights the full range of resources available. With support for both natural and specified search, we built a search system that makes finding resources faster, more intuitive, and more comprehensive than ever before. We have also incorporated user diversity through multilingual support; currently, the platform supports English and French, with additional languages, including African languages, under development.

Docs & Resources

Check out our docs, which now provide better insights into the different components of Lanfrica. We also release guides and informational resources within the docs. We are particularly proud to unveil Lanfrica’s premier data governance policy .

Giving Users More Control

Lanfrica was created as a participatory approach to connecting the various efforts across Africa to inspire and empower building AI that solves African problems. With the user account creation integration in V2, we have taken a giant step towards enabling participation from the wider community in our mapping vision.

We can’t wait for you to sign up! Lanfrica is a different experience when you’re signed in: it unlocks a more personalized platform, giving you useful features and greater control.

But that’s not all…

Our work doesn’t stop with this launch. We have ambitious plans for the coming years:

The road to V3: V2 is tagged “the era of search” because we focused on improving the search experience. Our unique value is coverage: when you use Lanfrica, you are tapping into the most comprehensive map of African AI resources ever assembled. You are searching the continent’s efforts, not just a single, siloed repository. V3 will take us even closer in the participatory direction, by enabling users directly contribute to the mapping – what we call “linking”. And there’s more. We will be detailing our roadmap for V3 here.

Connecting More Resources, More Domains: we are rapidly scaling our mapping efforts this year, aiming to reach 1M+ resources by the end of 2025. Given the extensive impact of AI technology, we are broadening our focus beyond language to encompass other crucial domains such as healthcare, climate, and agriculture. Furthermore, we are enthusiastic about the ongoing development of an automated metadata harvester for API-based repositories and knowledge sources, supplementing our existing Lanfrica Harvester which operates with OAI-PMH.

The First Comprehensive Atlas: our second major goal by 2026 is to build the first-ever statistics atlas of African datasets. This project, read more about here, will provide quantitative, evidence-based insights to guide us towards understanding what exists and where the gaps are.

Connect With Us and Join the Mission

Lanfrica is, and always will be, a community-powered effort.

Dedicated Help and Support channels: join our Discord community server to connect with us, for dedicated support, to discuss your use cases, or to get help with linking African resources. There are other ways to reach out beyond Discord: explore our support page. If you encounter any issues, need assistance, or just can’t find what you’re looking for, please reach out.

Visit lanfrica.com to explore the platform and start discovering the vast world of African AI. Check out the docs, and a Happy International Open Access Week!