AI4Africa/african-ai-datasets

A curated, community-maintained list of free and open datasets for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning projects focused on Africa. # 🌍 Awesome African AI Datasets A **curated, community-maintained** list of **free and open datasets** for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning projects **focused on Africa**. Datasets are tagged by **domain**, have Kaggle-style metadata, and are verified to be truly free for research or commercial use (license permitting). ✅ **Always check individual dataset licenses before use.** --- ## 📂 Table of Contents - Natural Language Processing (NLP) - Speech / Voice - Computer Vision & Wildlife - Geospatial & Agriculture - Climate & Weather - Health & Demographics - Contribution Guide --- ## 🗣 Natural Language Processing (NLP) ### MasakhaNER - **Description**: Named Entity Recognition datasets for multiple African languages. - **Languages**: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, Amharic, Wolof, Kinyarwanda, and more. - **Size**: ~20K annotated sentences. - **Samples**: Named entities tagged in context. - **Tasks**: NER model training, evaluation, transfer learning. - **Source**: Masakhane Project. - **Link**: github.com - **License**: Mixed permissive licenses. - **Last Updated**: 2021-05 - **Best For**: Low-resource NLP research, multilingual NER. ### MasakhaPOS - **Description**: POS-tagged datasets for African languages. - **Languages**: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, Wolof, etc. - **Size**: ~10K sentences. - **Samples**: Tokenized and tagged sentences. - **Tasks**: POS tagging model development. - **Source**: Masakhane Project. - **Link**: github.com - **License**: CC BY-SA 4.0. - **Last Updated**: 2020-11 - **Best For**: Linguistic modeling & POS benchmarking. ### African Storybooks Corpus - **Description**: Children's storybooks in multiple African languages. - **Languages**: Zulu, Xhosa, Swahili, Amharic, Hausa, etc. - **Size**: 3,000+ books. - **Samples**: Parallel text in multiple languages. - **Tasks**: Machine translation, text generation. - **Source**: African Storybook Project. - …