Inclusive AI promoting African languages: reducing biases, strengthening digital sovereignty and opening new economic opportunities.
1. Why talk about inclusive AI?
AI is everywhere: translation, vocal assistants, chatbots, educational applications. But behind this progress, a disturbing reality: more than 80 % of online content is produced in a dozen languages, leaving aside the thousands of African languages. This absence leads to cultural and linguistic biases, with a risk of dismissing millions of digital citizens.
2. An underestimated economic lever
The valuation of local languages can generate new opportunities:
- Education and training: learning tools adapted to local languages.
- Tourism and culture: development of linguistic heritage.
- Innovation and employment: creation of positions for data engineers, linguists, researchers.
According to some cultural experts like Njeunga Yopa, the AI projections could bring up to $ 2,900 billion to the African economy by 2030, if its potential is fully exploited.
3. The challenges of an inclusive AI in Africa
Insufficient infrastructure: less than a hundred data centers throughout the continent.
Extreme linguistic diversity: more than 2,000 languages, often non -standardized.
Lack of annotated data: without corpus, it is impossible to train reliable models.
Political vision still low: need for national funding and strategies.
4. Strategies to build inclusive corpus
Use public sources: local news, blogs, mozilla commons, social networks.
Collaborate with communities: crowdsourcing, collection via mobile apps, partnerships with native speakers.
Create synthetic data: paraphrases, back-translation, lexical substitution.
Translation and alignment: Building multilingual parallel corpus thanks to resources like Flores-200, Metchoup Translate or JW300.
5. Case study: MEDUMBA in Cameroon
MEDUMBA, Bamileke language spoken by 200,000 people, illustrates the difficulties. In the absence of digital resources, each technical term must sometimes be created from scratch. A team of researchers recently constituted a corpus of 2,050 phrases translated into MEDUMBA. Result: a first step towards models capable of treating this language, but also an example of the titanic efforts necessary for each African language.
6. Towards linguistic and digital sovereignty
Building an inclusive AI is:
- Guarantee the digital sovereignty of the continent.
- Make technology accessible to everyone, including non -literate populations via vocal interfaces.
- Stimulate the creation of local start-ups specializing in data and AI.
- Promote an economy of knowledge rooted in African cultural realities.
7. Conclusion & Perspectives
Africa should not only consume AI, but co-construct it. Each language integrated into the models is a victory against digital exclusion and an economic opportunity. The road is long, but initiatives show that an inclusive AI is possible.
