daniel-obare/AI4D-Swahili-News-Classification-Challenge

# AI4D-Swahili-News-Classification-Challenge Kiswahili is a lingua franca spoken by 100-150 million people across East Africa. It is an official language in the DRC, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda; in Tanzania it is a first language for most people and the official language of instruction in all schools, while in other countries it is a common second language. News in Kiswahili is an important part of the media sphere in East Africa. News contributes to education, technology, and economic growth of a country, and news in local languages plays an important cultural role in many Africa countries. In the modern age, African languages in news and other spheres are at risk of being lost as English becomes the dominant language in online spaces. The objective of this hackathon is to develop a multi-class classification model to classify news content according to six specific categories.The model can be used by Swahili online platforms to automatically group news according to their categories and help readers find the specific news they want to read. In addition, the model will contribute to a body of work ensuring that Swahili is represented in apps and other online products in future.