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FAIR Forward / GIZ

The German Development Cooperation initiative “F AI R Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All” strives for a more open, inclusive and sustainable approach to Artificial Intelligence on an international level. To achieve this, we are working together with five partner countries: Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda and India.

We want to remove entry barriers to AI and democratize access to AI Training Data and AI Technologies for Local Innovation. To achieve this, FAIR Forward facilitates the provision of open, non-discriminatory and inclusive local AI training data and open source AI applications.

FAIR Forward is working on AI resources from datasets and models to prototypes and AI use cases. Here you can find some of our projects and what we have learnt from them

For more information on our actions, see:
FAIR Forward Website: FAIR Forward – Open data for AI
For an overview of FAIR Forward’s African language datasets also see Lanfrica .
FAIR Forward on Twitter @fair_forward

Projects and AI Pilot

Where to read more about it

Lessons we have learned

Mbaza chatbot Rwanda

Press Release Chatbot RBC Mbaza

Chatbot | Digital Umuganda

COVID-19 Chatbot erreicht mehr als 500,000 Menschen in Ruanda – Toolkit Digitalisierung

Mbaza – The chatbot giving access to COVID-19 information throughout Rwanda (europa.eu)

Mozilla Foundation – In Rwanda, Voice Technology Innovation Helps Fight COVID

Radiant Earth Zindi Challenge

Press Release Chatbot RBC Mbaza
Chatbot | Digital Umuganda
COVID-19 Chatbot erreicht mehr als 500,000 Menschen in Ruanda – Toolkit Digitalisierung
Mbaza – The chatbot giving access to COVID-19 information throughout Rwanda
Mozilla Foundation – In Rwanda, Voice Technology Innovation Helps Fight COVID

Data Challenge Winners: Q&A with MG Ferreira and Tien-Dung LE | by Radiant Earth Foundation | Radiant Earth Insights | Medium

Radiant Earth Zindi Challenge

Radiant Earth Spot the Crop Challenge – Zindi

Data Challenge Winners: Q&A with MG Ferreira and Tien-Dung LE | by Radiant Earth Foundation | Radiant Earth Insights | Medium

CommonVoice Kinyarwanda

Common Voice (mozilla.org)

Mozilla Foundation – Lessons from Building for Kinyarwanda on Common Voice

Welcome to Common Voice Community 🥳 | Community Playbook (common-voice.github.io)

CommonVoice Luganda

Common Voice (mozilla.org)

How we added Luganda to Mozilla’s Common Voice project (ericpeter.github.io)

Welcome to Common Voice Community 🥳 | Community Playbook (common-voice.github.io)

CommonVoice Swahili

Common Voice (mozilla.org)

Welcome to Common Voice Community 🥳 | Community Playbook (common-voice.github.io)

Radio Dataset Luganda / Keyword Spotter Uganda

[2206.09790] The Makerere Radio Speech Corpus: A Luganda Radio Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition (arxiv.org)

The Makerere Radio Speech Corpus: A Luganda Radio Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition | Zenodo

[2206.09790] The Makerere Radio Speech Corpus: A Luganda Radio Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition (arxiv.org)

TTS datasets in India

Indian Institute of Science (iisc.ac.in)

Democratising voice tech: IISc working on open source tech in 9 languages; raises $2 million | India News – Times of India (indiatimes.com)

See also: A Study on Open Voice Data in Indian Languages (indiaai.gov.in)

CommonVoice

Common Voice (mozilla.org)

Creating community-driven datasets: Insights from Mozilla Common Voice activities in East Africa