Building Africa's AI future .
We design open datasets, train language and voice models, and ship digital products that work in the languages 200+ million Africans actually speak.
Now shipping
Swahili ASR v2 — 23% lower WER than commercial baselines.
Partners & ecosystem
Who we are
An open community for African AI.
Swahili Developers is a research and engineering community building the data, models, and tooling Africa needs to participate in the AI economy on its own terms.
We work in the open, partner with universities and ministries, and deliver products that move from notebook to production — in clinics, courts, classrooms, and farms.
Read our storyFocus areas
What we work on.
Swahili ASR
Speech recognition tuned to East African accents and code-switching.
Health AI
Clinical voice and triage models for low-resource settings.
Vision & OCR
Document, ID and license-plate recognition trained locally.
Language Models
Foundational LLMs grounded in Swahili and African contexts.
Open Datasets
Crowd-sourced, ethically licensed datasets for the ecosystem.
Localization
Translation, voice and search for products entering Africa.
Featured projects
From research to production.
Speech
Swahili ASR
An open speech recognition model trained on 1,200+ hours of Swahili audio.
Read case study
Health
MedASR
Voice transcription for clinicians in Tanzanian hospitals — Swahili-first.
Read case study
Vision
TZ Plates OCR
Real-time license plate recognition tuned for Tanzanian formats and lighting.
Read case study1,200+
Hours of Swahili audio
40+
Open-source contributors
12
Production deployments
5
Partner institutions
Let's build together