Mozilla has awarded eight projects each USD $50,000, leveraging the Kiswahili language and voice technology to increase social and economic opportunities for marginalized groups in Kenya, Tanzania, and the Kiswahili-speaking Democratic Republic of Congo. These awards, totaling $400,000 USD, are advancing financial inclusion, access to reliable information for smallholder farmers, and legal rights to land ownership for marginalized communities.
Mozilla’s Common Voice is an open-source initiative to address this disparity, by creating open-source voice data sets in underserved languages. Much of Common Voice’s work focuses on building a Kiswahili data set — and these Common Voice Kiswahili awards are a part of that work.
Voice technology is increasingly the gateway to the internet — but this technology doesn’t serve everyone equally. Indeed, neither Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, nor Google Home support a single native African language. This means that millions of people who speak Kiswahili and other African languages can’t use voice technology to do something as simple as checking the weather — or something as important as checking for COVID updates.
These grants are supported by the Gates Foundation in collaboration with the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and GIZ, as a response to a gender conscious and community centered approach to tech development. Ultimately, it advances the use of open-source voice data for products that support community participation and engagement.
