Masakhane: towards digital sovereignty

Artificial intelligence is spreading rapidly across Africa, particularly through applications that support smallholder farmers. Yet these tools remain out of reach for millions of people who speak neither English nor French. The continent is home to around 2,000 languages, but centuries of colonial rule and the global dominance of English in technology and international communication have pushed many of them to the margins. A tech ecosystem largely shaped by Western and Asian powers risks leaving Africa’s history, its 54 nations, its languages and its cultures underrepresented in the digital age. In response, a collective of African data scientists and linguists launched Masakhane in 2019, an open-source collaborative platform dedicated to closing this linguistic and digital divide. Its mission is to advance natural language processing by Africans, for Africans, ensuring that African languages are fully represented in the development of AI. Masakhane has already developed intelligent machine translation systems for around forty African languages, gradually building an infrastructure for both cultural and digital sovereignty. “Our goal is to ensure that Africans can take ownership of technological progress and use it in the service of human dignity, well-being and equality,” the collective says. Today, Masakhane is seeking to establish a dedicated fund to develop an AI ecosystem that is genuinely inclusive and truly multilingual.