LINGUA Africa targets one billion Africans with inclusive AI fund
Gates Foundation and Google.org back open call for African language AI
#Africa #NLP – Kenya-based African language AI organisation the Masakhane African Languages Hub has joined forces with Microsoft AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation, and Google.org to launch LINGUA Africa with an open call for proposals designed to strengthen the language foundations needed for inclusive AI across the continent. Projects can apply for funding of up to $250,000 in cash plus up to $400,000 in compute credits, alongside technical support and collaboration opportunities. The initiative directly supports the Masakhane African Languages Hub’s goal of empowering one billion Africans with locally relevant AI tools and resources by 2029. The call for proposals closes on 15th June 2026.
SO WHAT? – Africa is home to more than 2,000 languages, yet the vast majority are absent from the datasets, models and benchmarks that underpin modern AI platforms. This risks creating a persistent barrier to AI access across the continent. When farmers cannot receive crop advisory services in their own language, when patients cannot access health information, when citizens cannot interact with government services digitally, AI fails to deliver its promised value. LINGUA Africa puts serious funding and compute behind the organisations working to close that gap.
KEY POINTS:
The Masakhane African Languages Hub, Microsoft AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation and Google.org have launched LINGUA Africa. The initiative is an open call for proposals to fund African language AI projects across data creation, model development and real-world sectoral applications. The deadline set for applications is June 15th, 2026.
LINGUA Africa has three funding tiers:
Data creation projects can receive up to $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in compute credits.
Model or tool development projects can receive up to $100,000 in cash and $100,000 in compute credits.
Sectoral application projects can receive up to $250,000 in cash and $400,000 in compute credits.
Selected projects receive more than funding. Support includes Azure compute credits, Google Cloud Platform credits, in-kind technical collaboration from Microsoft AI for Good Lab, structured support through academic fellows and expert collaborators, and access to the broader LINGUA Africa ecosystem.
Priority sectors for sectoral applications include agriculture and food security, education, healthcare and public health, financial inclusion, and government and civic services. In fact, all key areas where language barriers directly limit the impact of digital tools on everyday life across the continent.
The call is open to organisations both inside and outside Africa, provided those outside the continent demonstrate meaningful partnership with Africa-based institutions, communities or implementers. Strong community engagement and cross-institutional collaboration are explicit selection criteria.
LINGUA Africa builds on lessons from LINGUA Europe, which supported open datasets and evaluation resources for underrepresented European languages. The Africa initiative shifts focus toward connecting open language resources directly to real-world use cases and measurable community outcomes.
The Masakhane African Languages Hub’s overarching goal is to empower one billion Africans by 2029 with locally relevant AI tools and resources, unlocking opportunities for economic development, local innovation and the preservation of Africa’s linguistic heritage across the continent.
The initiative is anchored by the Masakhane Research Foundation, a pan-African organisation working to address the underrepresentation of African languages in natural language processing and AI by bringing together researchers, technologists, linguists and community members from across the continent.
ZOOM OUT – LINGUA Africa builds on momentum from the launch of the Masakhane African Languages Hub earlier this year. In January 2026, the Hub opened a grant programme to fund high-quality dataset development for 50 African languages, supported by Google.org, the Gates Foundation, the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and the International Development Research Centre. That programme targeted three pillars: automatic speech recognition data for 18 languages, real-world AI benchmarking studies, and culturally relevant multimodal datasets for 40 languages. However, the scale of the underlying need is huge. None of the top 34 globally used internet languages is African, yet the continent is home to more than 2,000 languages. LINGUA Africa represents the next layer of the hub’s effort.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
LINK
How to apply (Masakhane African Languages Hub)
Read more about African languages AI:
Kenya AI hub to fund datasets for 50 African languages (Middle East AI News)