AI for African Languages Conference 2025
Unlock the power of East African languages: Innovate, connect, and build inclusive language technology for tomorrow.
Published Proceedings (PMLR Vol. 314)
All accepted peer-reviewed submissions from AfriLang 2025 are published open-access in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research:
Organizing Committee
General Chair
Executive Director, Sunbird AI
Executive Director of Sunbird AI. Over a decade of research at Makerere University (co-founding the AI Lab), former research scientist at Google AI Ghana and UN Global Pulse Kampala. PhD from University of Groningen.
Co-Chairs
Lecturer, Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST)
Focuses on NLP and Neural Machine Translation for low-resource languages, including the English–Luganda parallel corpus. PhD from Handong Global University.
Head of AI Lab, Makerere University
Senior Lecturer and Head of Makerere AI Lab, leading initiatives in NLP, Machine Learning, and Responsible AI across East Africa. PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology.
Program Committee Chairs
Lecturer, Makerere University
Head of the Marconi Research and Innovation Lab at Makerere University, applying AI to healthcare in low-resource environments. PhD from Ghent University.
Director of Research, Sunbird AI
Director of Research at Sunbird AI, former Staff Research Software Engineer at Google (Open Buildings project) and UN Global Pulse. PhD from University of Edinburgh.
Chair of Computer Science, Makerere University
Professor & Chair of Computer Science at Makerere University, founder of AirQo, and founding board member of Sunbird AI. PhD from Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Program Committee Members
Program Schedule
All times in East Africa Time (EAT / GMT+3) • Friday, October 10, 2025
| Time | Session Details |
|---|---|
| 07:30 – 08:30 | Registration |
| 08:30 – 08:40 | Welcome Remarks Prof. Engineer Bainomugisha (Chair of Computer Science Department, Makerere University; Board Member, Sunbird AI) |
| 08:40 – 09:40 | Keynote and Product Launch By Sunbird AI Dr. Ernest Mwebaze & Dr. John Quinn |
| 09:40 – 10:00 | Official Opening Keynote Dr. Aminah Zawedde (Permanent Secretary, Ministry of ICT & National Guidance, Uganda) |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Group Photo / Tea & Coffee Break |
| 10:30 – 10:50 | Invited Talk: Language Preservation in the AI Age Ms. Babra Babweteera (Executive Director, Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda) |
| 10:50 – 11:00 | Opening of AfriLang Conference Dr. Joyce Nabende (Head, Makerere University Center for AI) |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | Invited Talk: African NLP Strategy Prof. Vukosi Marivate (Co-Founder, Masakhane NLP, Deep Learning Indaba, Lelapa) |
| 11:30 – 13:00 |
Paper Presentations: Session 1 (10 mins presentation + 5 mins plenary) 1. Promoting Uganda’s major local languages: Introducing Luganda Text generation models and diverse accent-aware TTS models Rashid Kisejjere, Reuben Magala, Abubakhari Sserwadda 2. Tonative: Community-Driven Extension of African Datasets Through Human-AI Collaboration Cynthia Jayne Amol, Sharon Ibejih 3. Bridging the Language Gap: Fine-Tuning LLama for Machine Translation in Low-Resource African Languages Mary Wambui Kariuki, Joseph Muguro, Ciira wa Maina, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare 4. Sauti Halisi: Towards Direct Speech-to-Text Translation for Colloquial and Code-Switched Swahili Brian Gillo |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch Break |
| 14:00 – 14:30 | Invited Talk on African Language Technology Dr. John A. Quinn (Director of Research, Sunbird AI) |
| 14:30 – 15:50 |
Paper Presentations: Session 2 (10 mins presentation + 5 mins plenary) 1. End-to-End Continuous Ethiopia Sign Language Recognition Anteneh Yehalem Tegegne 2. KALAM-NA: Multi-Dialectal Corpus for 16 variants of the Sara linguistic family of Chad Abdel-aziz Harane Abounounou 3. Robust Tokenization for Low-Resource Oromo Medical Texts via Novel Lightweight Augmentation Karthik Srikumar 4. How much speech data is necessary for ASR in African languages? An evaluation of data scaling in Kinyarwanda and Kikuyu Benjamin Akera, Evelyn Nafula, Patrick Walukagga, Gilbert Yiga, John Quinn, Ernest Tonny Mwebaze |
| 15:50 – 16:50 |
Panel Session: What next for African language AI Moderator: Dr. Ernest Mwebaze (Sunbird AI) Panelists:
|
| 16:50 – 17:00 | Closing Remarks |
Sponsors & Partners
