Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, led the South African arm of the African Next Voices project. University of Pretoria

How do you teach somebody to read a language if there’s nothing for them to read? This is the problem facing developers across the African continent who are trying to train AI to understand and respond to prompts in local languages.

To train a language model, you need data. For a language like English, the easily accessible articles, books and manuals on the internet give developers a ready supply. But for most of Africa’s languages — of which there are estimated to be between 1,500 and 3,000 — there are few written resources available. Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, in Sou

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