  Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as
voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These
are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or
Chinese. Without foundational digital resources for African languages, which
are considered low-resource in the digital context, these advanced tools remain
out of reach. This work details the AI4D - African Language Program, a 3-part
project that 1) incentivised the crowd-sourcing, collection and curation of
language datasets through an online quantitative and qualitative challenge, 2)
supported research fellows for a period of 3-4 months to create datasets
annotated for NLP tasks, and 3) hosted competitive Machine Learning challenges
on the basis of these datasets. Key outcomes of the work so far include 1) the
creation of 9+ open source, African language datasets annotated for a variety
of ML tasks, and 2) the creation of baseline models for these datasets through
hosting of competitive ML challenges.
