NOODL license: Empowering access to and use of African Datasets through Equitable Licensing

**Use the Nwulite Obodo Open Data License (NOODL) to balance open access to your datasets with your right to future returns. **

One of the key ways in which African communities are addressing the challenge of the low-resource nature of their languages in the machine learning and natural language processing space is through participatory research and open licensing of African language data/datasets arising from such research. A particularly compelling illustration of this challenge is the plethora of African language datasets that are openly shared on digital platforms using existing standard open licence without addressing the asymmetries in ability to utilise access and without acknowledgment of, and/or catering to the interests of data sources, content creators, translators, data curators, language technologists, data evaluators that understand the languages involved. These stakeholders have diverse needs and interests ranging from access to technology and electricity; keyboards, language preprocessors, MT toolkits, and access to compute resources; knowledge of both source and target languages, etc. Utilising open licences for the sharing of African language datasets needs to be undertaken in a manner that attends to the nuances of specific concerns, contexts, and people.