MTN—African Telecom giant has thrown its weight behind the African datasets to boost AI inclusion and preserve linguistic diversity across the entire continent.
MTN Group has pledged to support the creation of African language datasets, aiming to strengthen the continent’s role in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and prevent the marginalization of its 1.5 billion people in the global digital economy.
The announcement came during “The Y’ello Chair Vodcast: Your Link to the African Continent,” held alongside the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York. Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, called on both public and private sectors to collaborate on research into African languages. He specifically challenged MTN Group, which operates in 16 countries, 15 of them in Africa, to mobilize resources for the initiative.
Ralph Mupita, President and CEO of MTN Group, responded positively: “We like these kinds of partnerships. Challenge accepted.”
The discussion followed the launch of the Nigerian Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale (N-ATLAS), an open-source multilingual large language model (LLM) designed to process Nigeria’s linguistic diversity while preserving cultural heritage. The project, developed through a partnership between the Nigerian government and Awarri Technologies, addresses the needs of Nigeria—the continent’s most populous country with more than 500 spoken languages—by providing datasets that can be applied in education, healthcare, commerce, and governance.
Read Also: MTN Nigeria Now Valued More Than Financial Institutions
The N-ATLAS framework is intended for broader adoption across Africa, a continent home to over 2,000 languages, many of which remain underrepresented in digital systems. By developing language datasets, MTN and its partners hope to unlock locally relevant AI-driven solutions that can drive innovation and inclusion.
Mupita stressed the importance of digital inclusion, noting, “We have to avoid the risk of Africans being a digital underclass.” He described the digital economy as Africa’s “best bet” for promoting opportunity, dignity, and participation. “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.”
Industry observers say MTN’s commitment represents a major step in ensuring that African languages and cultures are integrated into the next generation of AI technologies, rather than being left behind in a rapidly evolving global digital landscape.
