A Hausa-language humanitarian crisis text classifier built with AfriBERTa and Gradio.
# 🔍 Hausa Crisis Signal Detector
**Built by Sadiya Muhammad Kilgori**
A natural language processing tool that classifies Hausa-language text into humanitarian crisis categories to support early warning systems in Northern Nigeria and the Sahel.
---
## Why This Exists
Northern Nigeria is home to over 70 million Hausa speakers and is one of the regions most affected by conflict, displacement, food insecurity, and climate-related disasters. Yet almost all digital humanitarian tools — early warning systems, crisis monitoring platforms, and response coordination tools — operate in English or French.
This project builds the infrastructure to change that: a classifier that can read Hausa text from social media, news sources, or community reports, and flag signals of humanitarian crisis before they escalate.
---
## Crisis Categories
| Category | Hausa | Description |
|---|---|---|
| `conflict` | Rikici / Tashin Hankali | Armed conflict, violence, security incidents |
| `displacement` | Gudun Hijira | People forced to flee their homes |
| `food_insecurity` | Yunwa / Karancin Abinci | Hunger, food shortages, nutrition crises |
| `disease_outbreak` | Annoba / Cutar Yaduwa | Infectious disease or health emergency |
| `flood` | Ambaliyar Ruwa | Flooding or water-related disaster |
| `no_crisis` | Ba Matsala Ba | No crisis signal detected |
---
## Technical Stack
- **Model:** AfriBERTa Large (`castorini/afriberta_large`) — fine-tuned for Hausa crisis classification
- **Framework:** Hugging Face Transformers
- **Training:** Google Colab (free GPU)
- **Two separate deployment targets:**
- **`app.py`** — Gradio demo, deployed on Hugging Face Spaces. Free, public, for showcasing the model.
- **`api.py`** — FastAPI service, deployed as a metered commercial API via RapidAPI. Requires a `RAPIDAPI_PROXY_SECRET` and loads the model from a **local checkpoint**, not the public Hub — see the note in "How to Deploy the API" below on why.
---
## Project Structure
```
hausa-crisi …