Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming various sectors worldwide, but for many Africans, language and cultural barriers still limit access to these advancements. To solve this challenge, EqualyzAI, an Afro-centric AI startup is on a mission to ensure AI can understand and communicate in African languages, starting from Nigeria’s indigenous languages.
Using hyperlocal multimodal datasets, created in collaboration with native language speakers, the firm is building agentic AI solutions capable of understanding, processing, and generating responses in many African languages.
Speaking at a recent event marking International Mother Language Day, Olubayo Adekanmbi, founder of EqualyzAI emphasised the importance of language in preserving cultural identity.
“Everything that we represent is codified in our language,” he noted. “Several languages in Nigeria have gone extinct because they are not digitised. There is no way for the next generation to learn them.”
He highlighted that Africa is home to over 2,000 languages, yet most AI models struggle to understand a fraction of them.
International Mother Language Day, established by UNESCO in 1999, commemorates the sacrifices of the people of Bangladesh, who fought to have Bengali recognised as an official language on 21 February 1952. The event highlights the critical role of language in human development, a cause that aligns with EqualyzAI’s objectives.
Adekanmbi expressed concerns about the digital divide, where dominant languages on the internet shape AI’s learning while local languages remain marginalised.
“If today AI is learning only from languages on the internet, how many of our languages are on the internet that AI can learn from?” he asked. “If we do not increase our language presence online, we will enter another level of digital divide, a form of neo-colonialism where dominant languages dictate the future of AI.”
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