Bridging the AI Divide: DSFSI Drives Multilingual Knowledge Access at UP's “Abstracts into Indigenous Voices” Event
On August 12, 2025, the University of Pretoria hosted a landmark event — Abstracts into Indigenous Voices — bringing together researchers, policymakers, technologists, and language activists to tackle one of Africa’s most pressing AI challenges: ensuring that indigenous languages thrive in the digital age.
This pilot project is about more than translation — it’s about reimagining knowledge access through a combination of human expertise and AI innovation. Led by the Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) Lab, the initiative aims to break down linguistic barriers in academia, confront the “digital language death” facing many African languages, and build the terminology, data, and tools they need to flourish in the age of AI.
💡 Highlights include:
Professor Vukosi Marivate’s call for “ruthless collaboration” to break down institutional silos and invest in indigenous languages as a foundation for future generations.
Dr. Idris Abdulmumin’s eye-opening machine translation demos showing the stark gap between “digitally abundant” languages like Afrikaans and under-resourced ones like isiZulu and Sepedi.
Prof. Elsabé Taljard and Dr. Helena Kruger-Roux’s on-the-ground insights into the “double burden” of translating under-resourced languages while also creating missing terminology.
Prof. Chijioke Okorie’s challenge to rethink knowledge governance so Africa becomes a co-creator of AI tools, not just a data annotator.
This wasn’t just an event — it was a collective commitment to epistemic justice, digital inclusion, and ensuring that AI in Africa serves African languages and communities.
📖 Read the full story, watch speaker videos, and explore the machine translation demo here:
🔗 Full Blog Post on DSFSI Website