African Tongues and Languages at Scale (ATLAS)

Umoja means unity. Across Africa, more than 2,000 languages are spoken, yet AI understands only a fraction. ATLAS Umoja AI is an open platform bringing together governments, industry, researchers and innovators to build the benchmarks, models and communities needed for African language AI.

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2,000+

Why Atlas umoja ai

The building blocks African AI has been missing

Benchmarks and models for African languages, built with local communities and free for developers to build on.

Benchmarks (opens in new tab)

Evaluation benchmarks built with language communities across the continent — so models can be tested on how well they actually understand African languages, not just approximate them.

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Models (opens in new tab)

Multilingual, multimodal models free to download, fine-tune, and deploy. Hosted on Hugging Face so the world can access, evaluate, and improve them.

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Community (opens in new tab)

Developers, startups, researchers, and governments build on top — turning shared infrastructure into real tools for real people in real languages.

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Our commitment

ATLAS Umoja AI gives every nation and its builders access to the building blocks of AI.

A shared and open framework to accelerate building AI African Tongues and Languages at Scale.

atlas umoja ai

A living map of African language AI

Select a country to explore its open datasets and model. Live countries have open models available on Hugging Face today.

Live Coming soon

What's possible

Language is access

When AI understands local languages, developers build things that matter. A first look from Nigeria, where builders used N-ATLAS to create:

Civic & Legal

Civic Access

Team SabiLaw built a tool that simplifies Nigerian laws into clear, local languages — helping citizens understand their rights. Powered by N-ATLAS, it gives legally accurate explanations grounded strictly in Nigerian law.

Agriculture

Farm Eyes

Team Afolabi Ajao's crop-health platform helps smallholder farmers detect disease early through voice-first, multilingual guidance. Computer vision plus N-ATLAS turns complex diagnoses into clear advice in local languages.

Housing & Tenancy

Lauya mi

A tenant rights assistant that speaks their language. Built on N-ATLAS, it helps renters navigate housing disputes and understand their legal protections — in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Pidgin.

How it works

Each country, in its own identity

ATLAS Umoja AI is a shared framework that each country can use to shape and build its own AI model. One that's based on its local language, dialects and culture. All on a timeline that suits them.

Support the next country launch

A national ministry, research institution, or civic organisation steps forward. They anchor the initiative, connect with speaker communities, and own the process.
Collect with communities

Language data is gathered through structured programmes — recorded, transcribed, and validated by native speakers who understand the nuance of each language.
Train & release openly

A model is trained on the collected data and released on Hugging Face under an open licence. Any developer anywhere can download, fine-tune, and build on it.