Our mission
Language AI should work for everyone — including Zambians
Large language models are trained almost entirely on English and a handful of European languages. Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Lozi — the languages that 19 million Zambians speak at home, in markets, in churches — are effectively invisible to AI.
Afrobabel exists to change that. We are building the open infrastructure that language AI for Zambian languages needs: a structured, rights-cleared, culturally grounded training corpus — built with contributors, not extracted from them.
Every submission to an Afrobabel competition becomes part of the corpus. Every contributor retains full attribution. Every dataset record is released under CC-BY-SA-4.0 so researchers, developers, and future generations can build on it freely.
How it works
Three steps from story to training data.
01
Write
Contributors submit original stories, poems, folk tales, and essays in a Zambian language. Full metadata is captured — language, dialect, fluency level, cultural category.
02
Review
A panel of trained reviewers scores each submission for fluency, naturalness, cultural authenticity, and creativity. Reviewers flag anything that shouldn't enter the corpus.
03
Release
Reviewed submissions are packaged as a Hugging Face Dataset — structured, attributed, and openly licensed. Researchers can load the corpus in one line of Python.
Board & advisors
Afrobabel is governed by a multidisciplinary board of linguists, technologists, and community advocates.
Dr. Mulenga Kapwepwe
Board Chair
Zambian Language Council
Linguist and author with 20 years of work on Bemba literature and language preservation.
Prof. Charity Mwape
Academic Advisor
University of Zambia — Linguistics Dept.
Leads UNZA's Centre for African Language Studies. Specialises in computational approaches to Bantu languages.
Tendai Phiri
Technology Lead
Afrobabel Foundation
Software engineer and open-source advocate. Previously at iHub Nairobi and Mozilla Africa.
Sister Beatrice Nkonde
Community & Ethics
Churches Health Association of Zambia
Advocates for community-centred data governance. Ensures contributor rights are protected at every step.
Partners
UNESCO
Knowledge Partner
Lacuna Fund
Data Grant Recipient
Mozilla Foundation
Open Source Ally
UNZA Linguistics Dept.
Research Partner
Join the effort
Whether you're a writer, a linguist, a developer, or a researcher — there is a place for you in the Afrobabel community.
Create an account