gabrielmahia/swahili-civic-nlp

NLP datasets and tools for Swahili civic language — East Africa coordination infrastructure. DPGA GID0093743. # swahili-civic-nlp **Swahili civic NLP datasets and tools for East Africa AI coordination infrastructure.** ## The Data Gap This Addresses **AfricaNLP 2025/2026 findings:** - Only **4 African languages** receive consistent NLP research attention: Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans, Malagasy - **98%+ of African languages** have no meaningful AI coverage (Hussen et al., 2026, arXiv:2506.02280) - Swahili is one of the 4 supported — but civic and legal Swahili is severely underrepresented even within Swahili NLP corpora - AfricaNLP 2025 identifies healthcare, civic, and legal as the domains with the most critical accuracy and trust requirements — and the most data gaps **What this dataset provides:** Constitutional rights, government service descriptions, M-PESA terms, and civic process explanations in Swahili — the domain-specific civic language that general Swahili corpora do not cover. **Why it matters:** AI systems deployed in civic contexts (rights information, service navigation, accountability) that hallucinate or mistranslate cause measurable harm. Domain- specific grounding in verified civic Swahili is a prerequisite for safe deployment. Part of the AI-KungFU Nairobi Stack — the largest open-source MCP coordination infrastructure for the Global South. ## What This Is NLP resources for Swahili civic language, including: - Intent detection for civic queries (health, land, education, government) - Sentiment analysis on civic text - Named entity recognition for Kenyan civic context - M-PESA, health, education, and government domain vocabulary - KCSE/KCPE education terminology - County government terminology for all 47 counties ## Dataset The dataset is published on HuggingFace: - **gmahia/swahili-civic-nlp** - Available on HuggingFace and PyPI - License: CC BY 4.0 ## Why Swahili NLP Matters > Swahili AI fails at 4× the rate of English on civic tasks. Most open NLP benchmarks are English-first. Swahili has 200M+ speakers across East and Central Africa b …