Alioune Badara Mbengue

Senegal

This engineer has launched AWA, the first artificial intelligence system in Wolof, and plans to expand it to other African languages.

Alioune Badara Mbengue began his career as an entrepreneur in 2015 by developing a smart bin called Mbal-it, with the aim of promoting waste sorting in Senegal. But because the machine was unable to understand Wolof, the country’s main language, its impact remained limited… From then on, the entrepreneur devoted himself to integrating African languages into technology, so that no one would be excluded from digital services. He also came to realise that AI services developed in the West or Asia, trained on vast volumes of data overwhelmingly dominated by English, often fail to grasp African specificities and therefore provide users on the continent with less effective answers… In 2024, Mbengue founded the start-up Andakia, which developed AWA, an artificial intelligence solution in Wolof. For months, a multidisciplinary team—engineers, developers and language-processing specialists, with the assistance of linguists—recorded and analysed Wolof speech in order to train the system. AWA can be deployed as an application programming interface or voice interface, integrated into WhatsApp, or accessed through a simple telephone call to obtain information or a service. Available since 1 November 2024, AWA was showcased during the presentation of the Senegal 2050 development framework, providing explanations in Wolof of the plan’s strategic priorities during the Prime Minister’s address. Andakia was also awarded the African Youth Award in the AI & New Technologies category. Buoyed by this success, Alioune Badara Mbengue now intends to expand AWA to other African languages, continuing his commitment to a more inclusive approach to technology.