Stories Joy Agwunobi
MTN Group has pledged its support for Nigeria’s call to accelerate the development of African language datasets, a move seen as crucial to building large language models (LLMs) that can power homegrown artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for the continent’s 1.5 billion people.
The commitment was made during The Y’ello Chair Vodcast: Your Link to the African Continent, where Nigeria’s minister of communications, innovation and digital economy, Bosun Tijani, underscored the urgency of collaborative investment in academic research to capture and digitise Africa’s linguistic wealth.
He noted that without such efforts, Africans risk being excluded from the fast-evolving global AI ecosystem.
Tijani challenged MTN Group, which operates in 16 markets, 15 of them in Africa — to mobilise resources in support of this vision. Responding, Ralph Mupita, president and CEO of MTN Group, affirmed the company’s readiness to partner on the initiative.
“We like these kinds of partnerships. Challenge accepted,” Mupita said, adding that the digital economy offers Africa its “best bet” for creating dignity, hope, and opportunity for its citizens.
The vodcast, hosted by Angela Wamola, GSMA’s head of sub-Saharan Africa, was recorded on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York. It coincided with the launch of the Nigerian Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale (N-ATLAS), an open-source multilingual LLM designed to understand and generate Nigeria’s diverse voices.
N-ATLAS, a joint initiative between the Nigerian government and Awarri Technologies, seeks to digitise and preserve the country’s more than 500 languages while creating datasets to fuel AI-driven solutions.
Beyond Nigeria, the ATLAS framework has been structured as an open platform, enabling other African countries to adopt and adapt it for innovation in education, healthcare, commerce, and governance.
Mupita stressed the importance of avoiding what he called a “digital underclass,” pointing out that Africa’s more than 2,000 languages are poorly represented in global AI models. He argued that inclusive technology can play a central role in tackling poverty while ensuring economic participation and social dignity.
“The outcomes we want are that people are digitally included, economically included, and that they have dignity. This dignity point for me is very important because poverty can include all sorts of indignity, but embracing technology should take all that away,” he said.
For Tijani, N-ATLAS represents more than a technological breakthrough. He described it as a national commitment to unity, inclusion, and global contribution, while also positioning African voices at the centre of the global AI revolution.
With its open design, N-ATLAS has the potential to anchor Africa’s digital sovereignty, offering the continent an opportunity to lead in shaping AI systems that reflect its unique cultural and linguistic realities
