About Lanfrica Labs

Lanfrica Labs is the organization powering Lanfrica, the discovery platform. Learn more about it below.

Summary

The vast, fragmented, and siloed landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Africa is largely unmapped. This issue bottlenecks the scaling of AI in Africa in two major ways:

Firstly, this creates a fundamental lack of clarity about:

• Critical gaps in AI development: what vital tools, datasets, and applications are available and missing in different sectors?

• The actual impact of AI on African communities: are AI solutions addressing Africa's most pressing challenges in healthcare, agriculture, education, and governance?

• Emerging risks and challenges unique to African contexts: what African-centric risks of AI exist on the continent?

Secondly, this ambiguity culminates in a significant problem of discoverability. The resources that power AI innovation, including foundational tools (e.g., keyboards, dictionaries, and linguistic software), datasets, models, research papers, and applications, are often difficult for researchers and developers to locate. These assets are difficult to locate because they are fragmented, siloed, and often remain obscure.

This stifles AI innovation across the African continent in the following ways. It leads to the frequent reinvention of the wheel, with teams creating datasets for use cases where similar resources already exist.

Without a 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.

What We Do

Lanfrica Labs is a non-profit organization with the mission of connecting and mapping the landscape and trajectory of AI in Africa. Our innovative solution for this mapping is called “Lanfrica”. Lanfrica consists of the following:

1. Our unique technology for finding and organizing African AI resources.

2. An open-access platform for everyone.

Learn more about how Lanfrica works here.

How Lanfrica Labs provides value

Create visibility by organizing African knowledge Lanfrica's unique technology organizes under-represented African resources – tools, datasets, models, and applications. Our discovery platform, for example, enables:

• Developers to discover diverse African datasets for training, leading to more inclusive AI.

• Academic communities to explore various obscure African resources that help shape a better understanding of the African AI space.

• Decision makers to have a holistic view of the gaps in various African resources on the continent.

Map the AI Landscape with African context Lanfrica paints a clearer picture of the AI landscape in Africa through evidence-based, data-driven analyses that:

• Shed light on critical gaps in AI development in Africa

• Identify patterns, trends, and risks in AI adoption across different sectors – i.e. agriculture, climate, healthcare, language – in the African continent.

• Provide policy-makers and decision-makers with actionable insights that incorporate the context of Africa.