Geneva, Switzerland – The Ministry of Public Service Efficiency and Digital Transformation, Togo, through Togo AI Lab, together with Zindi and Umbaji, today launched a national initiative to collect language data and develop AI models for Togo’s 50 national languages. This will build the foundation to ensure that citizens can access critical public services in the languages they speak, supporting Togo’s ambition for total digital inclusion under its “National AI Strategy”.
Announced by Zindi CEO Celina Lee at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, the initiative aims to grow and improve digital language resources for Togolese languages. This partnership will allow Togo to develop AI systems that can better understand, process, and communicate in local languages.
Togo AI Lab, Zindi, and Umbaji will work together to create datasets and models as digital public goods that enable AI systems to understand, process, and communicate in Togolese languages. Over the coming months, the partners will develop and launch an open-source data collection platform, mobilise communities across the country to contribute speech and text data, and build a comprehensive language dataset covering Togo’s 50 national languages. The initiative aims to collect at least 50 hours of validated speech data and 6,000 sentence translation pairs for each of the country’s 50 national languages.
Building on these datasets, Zindi will launch four open AI challenges on the Zindi platform focused on building open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and machine translation AI models that will power future digital services across the country.
The competitions will offer a total of $40,000 USD in cash prizes, attracting AI researchers and data scientists from Togo, across Africa, and around the world.
This initiative builds on a first AI competition hosted by the Togo Ministry of the Digital Economy and Transformation in 2024, run on Zindi to use various demographic and geospatial datasets to predict the demand for fiber optics across the country. The top AI engineers and data scientists from that challenge were hired by Togo AI Lab, and are now contributing their skills to this new project.
Minister Cina Lawson said, “We view language models as essential public infrastructure for the digital age. This initiative transforms our linguistic diversity into a powerful asset for inclusive governance. By collecting local audio and text data and leveraging Zindi’s community to build these models, we are creating sovereign, safe, and inclusive AI tools. This is how a modern administration leverages technology to serve all its people, setting a new standard for AI in public policy”.
Celina Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Zindi, said:
“Too many African languages remain underrepresented in the datasets and models shaping today’s AI systems. By bringing together local communities, open data, and a global network of AI practitioners, this initiative ensures that Togo’s linguistic diversity is reflected in the next generation of African AI technologies. It serves as a blueprint for how countries can build sovereign AI ecosystems and turn linguistic heritage into tangible value for all citizens.”
About Togo AI Lab
Togo AI Lab is driving the development of data infrastructure and artificial intelligence to accelerate digital transformation, innovation and inclusive technology development in Togo.
The Lab provides the government with technical expertise and operational support in data governance, artificial intelligence, and digital innovation.
About Zindi
Zindi is the world’s leading AI challenge platform focused on emerging markets, with a community of more than 100,000 data scientists and AI practitioners across over 180 countries. Founded in 2018, Zindi connects organisations with top AI talent to solve real-world business, environmental and social challenges using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through large-scale competitions and community infrastructure, Zindi is building the talent pipeline and technical foundations for inclusive AI innovation worldwide.
About Umbaji
Umbaji is a Togo-based technology organisation specialising in AI, robotics, and digital solutions for social impact. Their YODI platform is a production-grade, community-driven data collection system that records, transcribes, and validates speech and text across WhatsApp, Telegram, mobile web, and USSD interfaces. Umbaji has successfully deployed multilingual data collection initiatives covering 11 languages in 6 African countrie
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Most Impactful Work: His correspondent work for New African magazine and articles for Radio France International (RFI) and Mail & Guardian.
Short Bio: Wanjohi Kabukuru is an experienced Kenyan journalist who serves as the Eastern African correspondent for New African, a leading pan-African monthly magazine. He covers a wide range of topics, including politics, environment, and security affairs across the continent.
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