MTN Group has committed to supporting the development of African language datasets for artificial intelligence, responding to a call from Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani.
The initiative seeks to ensure Africa’s 1.5 billion people are not sidelined by global AI systems that currently underrepresent the continent’s more than 2,000 languages.
Speaking on The Y’ello Chair Vodcast: Your link to the African continent, Dr. Tijani urged collaborative public and private sector investment to fund academic research into local languages.
“We like these kinds of partnerships. Challenge accepted,” MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita said, confirming the telecom operator’s commitment. The vodcast, hosted by GSMA’s sub-Saharan Africa head Angela Wamola, was filmed on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The discussion followed the launch of the Nigerian Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale (N-ATLAS), an open-source multilingual large language model (LLM) aimed at digitising Nigeria’s linguistic diversity and preserving its more than 500 spoken languages.
N-ATLAS, a joint initiative of the Nigerian government and Awarri Technologies, is intended to provide the datasets necessary for AI-driven innovation across education, healthcare, commerce, and governance.
Mupita stressed the urgency of ensuring Africa’s languages are included in AI development. “We have to avoid the risk of Africans being a digital underclass,” he said. He described the digital economy as the “best bet” for creating dignity and opportunity on the continent.
“The outcomes we want are that people are digitally included, economically included and that they have dignity. This dignity point for me is very important because poverty can include all sorts of indignity, but embracing technology should take all that away,” Mupita added.
The ATLAS framework is open to other African countries, providing a foundation for innovation in local languages. Advocates argue that without such efforts, Africa risks being excluded from global AI ecosystems that shape future economies and societies.
