Wannan littafin yana da matukar amfani! Ina ba da shawara ga kowa ya karanta.
"This book is genuinely useful — I recommend it to everyone."
One pipeline, start to published
Everything connects. Join, team up, learn, build, get mentored, and publish — each step has a home in Waraka.
- 01Join the communityStart on Discord — meet builders, ask questions, find your footing.Discord
- 02Find your teamJoin a group as a mentor or mentee and match with verified collaborators.AfriFinder
- 03Learn the craftMaster dataset design, collection, and quality — end to end.AfriPlaybook
- 04Create your datasetAnnotate and build open datasets with your team, in any domain.AfriAnnotate
- 05Get mentoredJoin the fellowship and grow from contributor to researcher.AfriNLP Fellowship
- 06Publish your first paperWrite it well with an expert guide — and ship it to a real venue.AfriWrite
AfriPlaybook
A practical guide to dataset creation, written with the communities who use it — from task formulation and label schema design to consent forms, inter-annotator agreement, and sustainability. Every chapter is built around real low-resource language scenarios.
- Step-by-step guidelines, video demos, and quality checklists
- Voice, text, speech–text alignment, and translation chapters
- Templates for consent, licensing, and governance toolkits
- Translated into 5 African languages with community review
AfriAnnotate
An open, mobile-first, Progressive Web App for grassroots data collection — built for the realities of African contexts: patchy connectivity, multiple scripts, and community-led annotation workflows.
- Offline-first capture with background synchronization
- Speech, text, ranking, and multimodal annotation support
- Inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss' κ, Krippendorff's α) dashboards
- African-language localization and virtual keyboards
- Apache 2.0 licensed with a clear contributor agreement
AfriFinder
Find verified annotators and African NLP experts by language, domain, and region — vouched for by the communities who speak the language. A marketplace for annotation jobs and a directory for researchers and linguists, in one place.
- Post annotation tasks and hire native-speaker annotators
- Search experts by language, NLP domain, and region
- Language Lead verification per language community
- Mobile money and local payout options for annotators
- Open profiles for collaboration and project invitations
From the Community
The Playbook is exactly the practical, reproducible guide that African NLP has needed — a real reference, not a brochure.
NLP researcherAfrican NLP community
Pairing the Playbook with the Tool turns annotation theory into reproducible practice — that combination is what makes it useful in the field.
Dataset builderAfrican NLP community
Documenting low-resource language work has long been ad-hoc — a shared playbook gives our teams a common vocabulary and saves a lot of guesswork.
Computational linguistAfrican NLP community
Open guidance like this lowers the barrier for builders across the continent to ship language-first AI products responsibly.
ML engineerAfrican NLP community
Open infrastructure for African languages is finally catching up with the rest of the field. This is a major milestone for the community.
Language technologistAfrican NLP community
A community-built standard for low-resource annotation. Long overdue and well executed — the kind of resource teams will reach for daily.
Educator & researcherAfrican NLP community
For multilingual annotation across Bantu languages, this is the resource I wish we had had years ago — clear, applicable, and honest about trade-offs.
PhD researcherAfrican NLP community
The combination of methodological rigor and African-context grounding makes this stand out from generic NLP guides — a long-overdue reference.
Open-source contributorAfrican NLP community
Help build the Playbook
We welcome researchers, practitioners, students, and language experts. Pick whichever fits — every contribution counts.
Write a chapter
Fill a gap in the Playbook — propose a chapter, write it, open a PR.
Translate a page
Adapt an existing chapter into Hausa, Amharic, Swahili, French, or Portuguese.
Join Discord
Discuss approaches, share your work, and meet other contributors.
Star on GitHub
Help the project gain visibility — every star widens its reach.
Thanks to our Contributors
The Playbook is built by a growing community of researchers, students, and language experts. If you've contributed code, content, or review — thank you.
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