masakhane-io/masakhane-community

All our community docs! Start here! Lets put Africa on the NLP Map # Masakhane - A living collection of NLP projects for Africans, by Africans **MASAKHANE** is an research effort for NLP for African languages that is OPEN SOURCE, CONTINENT-WIDE, DISTRIBUTED and ONLINE. This GitHub repository houses the data, code, results and research for building open baseline NLP results for African languages. Website: masakhane.io ## Our Mission Masakhane is a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. Despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, African languages are barely represented in technology. The tragic past of colonialism has been devastating for African languages in terms of their support, preservation and integration. This has resulted in technological space that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history. Masakhane roughly translates to “We build together” in isiZulu. Our goal is for Africans to shape and own these technological advances towards human dignity, well-being and equity, through inclusive community building, open participatory research and multidisciplinarity ## Our Values - **Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu** - loosely translated from isiZulu means “a person is a person through another person” or “I am because you are”. This philosophy calls for collaboration and participation and community. It proposes relationality, over individualism for stronger social cohesions towards sustainable communities. It believes we share our successes and one’s personhood is evaluated based on their contributions to the community. - **African-centricity**. We centralize the narratives of Africans as a remedy to the effects of Euro-centricism on our beliefs. This way we reassert a new way of looking at information from a African perspective and shun any attempts to devalue our knowledge and stories - **Ownership** - We believe that Africans should be in charge of owning, driving and participating in th …