We're opening up MasakhaneTool — the Masakhane community's open annotation platform — for early testing. If you annotate text or speech for African languages, work on community datasets, or teach data-collection workflows, we'd love your help shaping what we ship in v1.
When you spend years working inside a research community, you accumulate a sense of how it's changing — but you rarely get to see the change quantified. A new survey we published on arXiv tries to do exactly that for African NLP: map two decades of contributions, contributors, and impact, end to end.
Read the paper: The Rise of AfricaNLP: A Survey of Contributions, Contributors, Community Impact, and Bibliometric Analysis
The Masakhane community is opening a Call for Chapters for the Masakhane Playbook — a community-driven, open guide for building, evaluating, and deploying NLP systems for African languages. We invite researchers, practitioners, students, language experts, and community members to contribute chapters that shape how the next generation of African language technology is built.
This is the first post on the new Masakhane blog. We'll use this space to share community updates, calls for contribution, project milestones, and stories from teams building NLP for African languages.