At present, African languages are the least explored areas of African life, despite being the backbone of culture and knowledge. Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) presents a great opportunity to improve African life by using technological advances to make African languages and culture easily translated without the need for human translators.

The THIOMI-LughaNLP Initiative is building a database for African languages for the purpose of developing AI translation systems using NLP, with the main objective of making African environments linguistically accessible. This includes courtrooms, classrooms, hospital rooms, entrepreneurial spaces, and religious spaces.

However, translating between African languages poses significant challenges due to the large number of languages spoken in Africa, with about 2000 languages. Although there are at least 75 languages in Africa with more than one million speakers, most African languages are yet to be included in existing machine translation systems. This is because the majority have small populations that speak them, making them poorly resourced with respect to data.

The THIOMI-LughaNLP Initiative aims to address these challenges by building an open-domain natural language translator for African languages, which will be used in various form factors such as headset interpreters, audio smartphone applications, web applications, and multiple forms of Internet-of-things (IOT) embeddings such as public address systems and microphones. The use cases are broadly classified into three categories: personal use, dialogue, and public address, as well as reading information from the internet, news, job seeking, etc.