Four major organisations have launched LINGUA Africa, an open call for projects building language foundations for inclusive artificial intelligence in Africa, with proposals due June 15, 2026.

The Masakhane African Languages Hub, Microsoft AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation, and Google.org are driving the initiative, which invites submissions from nonprofits, universities, research institutes, social enterprises, cultural organisations, startups, and consortia working in the public interest across the continent and beyond.

“The future of AI must be shaped by the people it serves,” said Chenai Chair, Director of the Masakhane African Languages Hub, framing the call as a structural intervention to ensure African communities actively shape the tools that govern their daily lives.

The initiative targets a gap with measurable consequences. African languages are severely underrepresented in AI systems, meaning digital tools reshaping healthcare, agriculture, education, and financial services routinely fail the communities that need them most. LINGUA Africa aims to correct this by funding open datasets, models, and real-world language applications grounded in African linguistic reality.

Funding is structured across three tracks. Data creation projects, focused on building and curating language datasets, are eligible for up to $50,000 in cash plus an equivalent amount in compute credits. Model and tool development work can access up to $100,000 in each category. Projects deploying language technologies in real-world settings with credible pathways to measurable social or economic impact qualify for up to $250,000 in cash and up to $400,000 in compute credits delivered through Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Beyond funding, selected projects will receive technical support from Microsoft AI for Good Lab, structured academic collaboration through expert fellows, and access to the broader LINGUA Africa network.

Howard Lakougna, Senior Program Officer at the Gates Foundation, said the initiative aims to unlock three resources that have long constrained AI progress across Africa: access to data, computational power, and technical assistance.

Priority will favour projects with strong community engagement, cross-institutional partnerships, and demonstrable impact pathways across agriculture, education, healthcare, financial inclusion, and civic services. The application is open to organisations both inside and outside Africa, provided they demonstrate meaningful partnerships with African institutions or communities.

For multilingual countries like Ghana, where major indigenous languages including Twi, Ewe, Ga, Dagbani, and Hausa remain largely absent from mainstream AI tools, LINGUA Africa represents a direct funding opportunity for locally driven solutions. The Masakhane Research Foundation (MRF), which anchors the Hub, works pan-continentally to advance natural language processing (NLP) in African languages, with a stated goal of reaching one billion Africans with locally relevant AI tools by 2029.