Hadiya2/HausaSafe

An open-source Hausa language AI safety evaluation suite — glossary, translation gap documentation, and evaluation prompts for testing AI models in Hausa # HausaSafe #hausasafe **An open-source Hausa language AI safety evaluation suite** Created by Hadiya Usman | Stakeholder Relations Officer, New Incentives | Director of Research, Nudge Innovation Hub | Strategic Advisor, African Institute for Artificial Intelligence --- ## What is HausaSafe? HausaSafe is an open-source project building the first structured Hausa-language resource for AI safety evaluation. It documents where AI safety concepts break down in Hausa, provides translated evaluation prompts for testing AI model behaviour, and offers a growing glossary of AI safety terminology in Hausa with cultural context notes. Hausa is spoken by millions of people across northern Nigeria, Niger, and the broader Sahel, one of the largest language communities in Africa. It has almost no representation in AI safety evaluations, red-teaming exercises, or governance frameworks. HausaSafe is built to close that gap. --- ## Why this matters When I sat down to translate an AI safety awareness pamphlet into Hausa for a community project, I discovered that foundational AI safety concepts have no Hausa equivalents: - **Deepfakes** — required a full explanatory sentence in Hausa. The word does not exist. - **Prompt** (in its AI meaning) — no Hausa equivalent at all. Not an approximate one. Not a borrowed one. Nothing. - **Alignment**, **misalignment**, **autonomous agent**, **existential risk** — all absent. This is not a translation problem. It is a safety problem. AI systems are already being deployed in Hausa-speaking communities in health surveillance, financial monitoring, and education without safety evaluations that account for how Hausa speakers understand, express, and respond to AI interactions. HausaSafe is built to make those evaluations possible. For the full argument, read my EA Forum post: Epistemic Exclusion of the Hausa Language in AI Safety --- ## What HausaSafe contains ## What HausaSafe contains | Folder | Contents | Status | |---|---|---| | ` …