MTN Group has committed to supporting the development of African language datasets, answering a call from Nigeria to help build large language models (LLMs) that will power homegrown AI solutions and ensure the continent’s 1.5 billion people are not left behind in the global digital revolution.
During The Y’ello Chair Vodcast: Your link to the African continent’, Dr Bosun Tijani, Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, said to leapfrog AI in Africa, a collaborative public/private effort was urgently needed to fund the academic research into the continent’s many languages. He challenged MTN Group – which has operations in 16 markets, 15 of them in Africa – to mobilise resources for this.
In response, Ralph Mupita, MTN Group President and CEO, also on the vodcast said, “We like these kinds of partnerships. Challenge accepted.”
The vodcast, which was filmed on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York, was hosted by Angela Wamola, who is the head of sub-Saharan Africa for the GSMA mobile industry association.
The vodcast followed the launch of the Nigerian Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale (N-ATLAS). This is an open-source multilingual LLM designed to understand and generate Nigeria’s diverse voices, digitising and preserving the country’s linguistic richness and creating datasets for AI solutions.
More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country. N-ATLAS is a public/private initiative of the government of Nigeria and Awarri Technologies. The ATLAS framework is open and available to other African countries, providing a platform for innovation in local languages and in so doing, transform education, health, commerce and governance.
Mupita said, “We have to avoid the risk of Africans being a digital underclas.” He said the digital economy was the “best bet” to ensure that citizens have dignity, hope and opportunity.
He added, “The outcomes we want are that people are digitally included, economically included and that they have dignity. This dignity point for me is very important because poverty can include all sorts of indignity, but embracing technology should take all that away.”
