The Kenya-based Masakhane African Languages Hub has joined forces with Microsoft AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation and Google.org to launch LINGUA Africa, an open call for proposals designed to strengthen the language foundations needed for inclusive AI across the continent.
Selected projects can apply for funding of up to $250,000 in cash and up to $400,000 in compute credits, alongside technical support and collaboration opportunities. The initiative directly supports Masakhane’s goal of empowering one billion Africans with locally relevant AI tools and resources by 2029. The call for proposals closes on June 15.
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. The gap risks creating a persistent barrier to AI access across the continent: when farmers cannot receive crop advisory services in their own language, patients cannot access health information, or citizens cannot interact with government services digitally, AI fails to deliver its promised value. LINGUA Africa is intended to put serious funding and compute behind the organizations closing that gap.
The initiative offers 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.
Beyond funding, selected projects will receive 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 — areas where language barriers directly limit the impact of digital tools on everyday life across the continent.
The call is open to organizations 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. It is anchored by the Masakhane Research Foundation, a pan-African organization addressing the underrepresentation of African languages in natural language processing and AI by bringing together researchers, technologists, linguists and community members from across the continent.
LINGUA Africa builds on momentum from the launch of the Masakhane African Languages Hub earlier this year. In January, the Hub opened a grant program 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 program focused on three pillars: automatic speech recognition data for 18 languages, real-world AI benchmarking studies, and culturally relevant multimodal datasets for 40 languages.
The scale of the underlying need is significant. 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 to address that gap.
