"Instead of these technologies delivering on the promise of bridging the gap towards access to information for everyone, they end up doing the opposite, which is increasing the gap by handling information for a select few, and now taking away information access for the majority of other speakers," said Audace Niyonkuru, the Chief Executive Officer of Digital Umuganda, a Rwanda-based AI company on a mission to enhance access to information and services in local African languages.
According to Niyonkuru, they specifically focused on building datasets including those for machine translation, speech recognition, and text-to-speech capabilities, all designed to cater to the Kinyarwanda language, which he said was often underserved by existing technologies. "These collaborations helped us gather datasets and information, especially for words and concepts lacking Kinyarwanda equivalents," he said, emphasising the role of RCHA in continuously providing data and working on dictionaries for various sectors.