MTN Group has committed to supporting efforts to collect datasets of African languages, a move seen as crucial to developing large language models (LLMs) tailored for the continent’s 1.5 billion people.
The pledge follows a call to action from Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, who stressed that Africa risks being sidelined by the global AI ecosystem if local languages remain underrepresented.
Speaking on The Y’ello Chair Vodcast: Your Link to the African Continent, Tijani said a collaborative public-private effort was urgently needed to fund academic research into Africa’s many languages. He specifically challenged MTN Group – which operates in 16 markets, 15 of them in Africa – to mobilise resources.
“We like these kinds of partnerships. Challenge accepted,” MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita responded during the vodcast, which was hosted by GSMA sub-Saharan Africa head Angela Wamola on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The discussion came shortly after Nigeria launched the Nigerian Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale (N-ATLAS), an open-source multilingual LLM designed to understand and generate the country’s diverse voices. With over 500 languages spoken in Nigeria, N-ATLAS seeks to digitise and preserve linguistic diversity while creating datasets to power AI solutions in education, health, commerce, and governance.
Developed as a public-private initiative between the Nigerian government and Awarri Technologies, N-ATLAS is part of the broader ATLAS framework, which is open to other African countries. The platform aims to address the representation gap of Africa’s 2,000-plus languages in global AI systems.
“We have to avoid the risk of Africans being a digital underclass,” Mupita said. He added that the digital economy represents the continent’s “best bet” to ensure dignity, hope, and opportunity for citizens.
“The outcomes we want are that people are digitally included, economically included, and that they have dignity. Poverty can include all sorts of indignity, but embracing technology should take all that away,” he said.
