Masakhane is a grassroots organization whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. Despite the fact that 2,000 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 a technological space that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, or our history. Even in the forums which aim to widen NLP participation, Africa is barely represented. Some problems facing NLP in African languages include lack of focus on African indigenous languages, the lack of resources for African languages which hinders the ability for researchers to do NLP, and the low discoverability of existing resources for African languages (often one needs to be associated with a specific academic institution in a specific country to gain access to the language data available for that country). The 4th Industrial Revolution in Africa cannot take place in only English, at the expense of many other world languages and cultures. It is imperative that language technologies are made inclusive for the African continent.

“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 in Masakhane revolve around collaboration, community, and inclusivity. We embrace the philosophy of “Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu,” emphasizing the interconnectedness of individuals. We prioritize African-centricity, reclaiming our narratives and knowledge. We value everyone's unique experiences and contributions. Kindness, responsibility, and data sovereignty guide our ethical practices. Reproducibility ensures transparency, while sustainability drives long-term impact. 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.

Links: https://www.masakhane.io/

Credit goes to the whole Masakhane community.

Some of the funds Masakhane has received for her various projects  include:

● Google: Funding to create dataset for cross-lingual question-answer models in 10 African languages and also funding for a joint Masakhane-Google internship.

● Lacuna Fund: Funding grants to create several datasets in machine translation, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis, text-to-speech models for various African languages.

● Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

● Google (in the form of compute credits)

Masakhane (https://www.masakhane.io) is the OPEN RESEARCH, PARTICIPATORY, GRASSROOTS NLP INITIATIVE FOR AFRICANS BY AFRICANS, with the aim of putting African research in NLP on the map, by holistically tackling the problems facing NLP. Founded in 2019, Masakhane has since garnered over 1,000 researchers from over 50 African countries, published state-of-the-art research (including a 2021 Wikimedia award of the year) for over 38 African languages at various venues, and has built a thriving community. 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.