African Data
Foundry

Raw Language · Refined Intelligence

We collect, validate, and license premium African-language AI training data, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Nigerian Pidgin, spoken by over 250 million people, yet almost invisible in global artificial intelligence.

Yoruba Igbo Hausa Nigerian Pidgin
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250M+
Speakers Represented
4
Nigerian Languages
0.87+
IAA Quality Target
$6.7B
AI Data Market by 2030
The Problem

Africa's languages are invisible to AI

The AI revolution is being built almost entirely in English. Over 2,000 African languages, spoken by 1.4 billion people, account for less than 0.1% of all AI training data. Nigeria's languages are among the most severely underrepresented on earth.

English
98%
Swahili
8%
Hausa
2%
Yoruba
<1%
Igbo
<1%
Pidgin
≈0%

Our Solution

A vertically integrated data foundry

We don't just scrape and clean. We create data that does not yet exist, validate it with certified native-speaker linguists, and deliver it in formats AI companies can use immediately.

1
Collection
Community drives, crowdsourcing, and digitisation of physical archives.
2
Ingestion
Automated intake, deduplication, language detection and quality filtering.
3
Annotation
Labelling, sentiment tagging, NER, translation pairing and dialogue structuring.
4
Validation
Native-speaker review, IAA scoring, dialect and tonal-accuracy verification.
5
Packaging
JSONL / Parquet formatting, data cards, statistics, licensing and delivery.
What We Produce

Datasets built for production

Six core dataset categories, each validated and licensed for commercial AI training.

Monolingual Text Corpus
Clean, validated sentences in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Pidgin for language-model pre-training.
JSONLPre-training
Parallel Translation Corpus
English ↔ Nigerian-language sentence pairs for machine-translation models.
TSVTranslation
Conversational Dialogue
Natural multi-turn conversations for chatbot and assistant training.
JSONDialogue
Annotated NER Dataset
Named entities tagged, people, places, organisations, for information-extraction models.
CoNLLNER
Sentiment Dataset
Text labelled with sentiment scores for opinion-mining and content-moderation systems.
CSVSentiment
Speech + Transcript Corpus
Hours of transcribed audio for ASR and speech-recognition model training.
WAVASR

Dataset Catalogue

Production-grade African data

A growing library of validated corpora across our four languages. Request any dataset for sample access and pricing.

YorubaComing soon
Yoruba Monolingual Corpus
Clean, diacritic-correct Yorùbá sentences across news, conversation, and literature domains.
Volume
120,000
IAA Score
0.91
JSONL · CommercialRequest
YorubaComing soon
Yoruba - English Parallel Set
Human-translated sentence pairs with verified tonal accuracy for machine translation.
Volume
45,000
IAA Score
0.89
TSV · CommercialRequest
IgboComing soon
Igbo Conversational Dialogue
Natural multi-turn Igbo conversations capturing Owerri, Onitsha and Enugu variants.
Volume
18,500
IAA Score
0.86
JSON · CommercialRequest
IgboComing soon
Igbo NER Dataset
Named-entity tagged Igbo text, people, places, and organisations.
Volume
30,000
IAA Score
0.88
CoNLL · CommercialRequest
HausaComing soon
Hausa Monolingual Corpus
Boko-script Hausa across formal and colloquial registers, regionally balanced.
Volume
95,000
IAA Score
0.90
JSONL · CommercialRequest
HausaComing soon
Hausa Speech + Transcripts
Transcribed Hausa audio for ASR training, sourced from native speakers across the north.
Volume
40 hrs
IAA Score
WAV · CommercialRequest
PidginComing soon
Nigerian Pidgin Sentiment Set
Sentiment-labelled Nigerian Pidgin with a standardised orthography, a category first.
Volume
25,000
IAA Score
0.87
CSV · CommercialRequest
PidginComing soon
Nigerian Pidgin Text Corpus
Everyday Nigerian Pidgin from markets, social media and casual conversation.
Volume
22,000
IAA Score
0.85
JSONL · CommercialRequest
The Languages

Four languages, 250 million voices

Yoruba
South-West Nigeria
45Mnative speakers
A tonal language with rich diacritics, spoken across Nigeria and a global diaspora.
Igbo
South-East Nigeria
30Mnative speakers
Marked by significant dialect variation across Owerri, Onitsha and Enugu.
Hausa
Northern Nigeria · Sahel
70Mspeakers
The most widely spoken language in West Africa and a regional lingua franca.
Nigerian Pidgin
Nationwide
100M+speakers
Nigeria's true cross-cutting vernacular, and a category we are helping standardise.

Why African Data Foundry

Six reasons buyers pay for our data

Scale
Orders of magnitude larger than the tiny academic datasets currently on Hugging Face, built for production training, not papers.
Validated Quality
Every dataset certified by native-speaker linguists with an inter-annotator agreement score above 0.87, proof your model trains on clean data.
Licence Clarity
Clean commercial licences, documented consent from every contributor, and a clear IP chain, no scraped-data legal risk.
Freshness
Living corpora updated with new batches, current slang, vocabulary and context, not a frozen 2019 snapshot.
Data Diversity
Natural conversations, market dialogue, regional dialects, authentic language that simply doesn't exist anywhere else.
Custom Domains
Medical, legal, financial, customer-service, we build bespoke domain datasets to your exact specification.
How It Works

From enquiry to delivery

STEP 01
Sample
We share a free sample dataset so your team can verify quality before any commitment.
STEP 02
Scope
We agree on volume, format, exclusivity and licence terms tailored to your use case.
STEP 03
Contract
A clean commercial licence with documented provenance and full IP assignment.
STEP 04
Deliver
Secure delivery via gated access, with data card, statistics and ongoing support.

About Us

Locally built. Globally trusted.

We believe the next billion people to use AI will do so in their mother tongue, and that the data to make that possible should be built by the communities who speak it.

Authenticity

We create data rooted in how people actually speak, tonal, dialectal, alive. Not translated BBC articles, but real language from real communities.

Fair Reward

Contributors are paid directly and fairly for every task, with rates calibrated to a living wage. Our community is not a cost line, it is the company.

Rigour

Every dataset is validated, scored and documented to a standard that frontier AI labs can trust and legally deploy.

The Team

Builders & linguists

O
Founder & CEO
Olajide
Leading the vision, partnerships and buyer relationships. Building the infrastructure to bring African languages into global AI.
?
CTO · Hiring
Lead Engineer
Owns the data pipeline, annotation platform and cloud infrastructure. Python, NLP tooling and scalable data engineering.
?
Lead Linguist · Hiring
Head of Quality
Sets annotation guidelines, trains validators, and owns the linguistic quality that makes our data certifiable.
Our Roadmap

The road ahead

Months 1–3

Foundation

CAC registration, core team hiring, university MoUs, annotation platform deployed, and the first community data drive, 10,000 raw sentences across two languages.

Months 4–6

First Product

50,000 validated sentences across all four languages. IAA above 0.80. First dataset sale completed and first buyer conversations opened.

Months 7–12

Growth

500,000 validated sentences, conversational and speech corpora begun, first exclusive licensing deal signed, and a co-authored research paper submitted.

Year 2–3

Scale

12+ African languages, 10M+ validated sentences, partnerships across West Africa, and a thriving contributor network rewarded through fair, rising pay.

Get In Touch

Build with us

Request a sample or partner with us

Whether you're training a frontier model, building for African users, or exploring a grant partnership, tell us what you need and we'll respond within two business days.

hello@africandatafoundry.com